New Frontiers for the Social Entrepreneurship API

This week comes an announcement of their new partner, Echoing Green, and the creation of a search widget designed to make the information more accessible.

The project has been around for around a year now, and in that time has made great progress bringing on new partners, including Civic Ventures, Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows, Draper Richards Foundation fellows, Skoll Foundation entrepreneurs and others. It's a good example of genuine collaboration in the field. While the teams at Social Edge and Social Actions have spearheaded the project, funding, leadership and creativity have come from an array of partners.

But more than anything, I think the attempt to unify information about social entrepreneurs reflects both the maturity and fragmentation of the social entrepreneurship field. It reflects the field's maturation in the sense that there are more examples of world-changing innovators than most people can keep track of without a resource like this. It reflects fragmentation in the sense that not all of these people even use the term "social entrepreneurship" to describe their work.

The API's efforts to form a basic framework -- organizing information by region and topic of focus -- is an attempt to make it easier to see the connections.

I think this week's updates show significant progress across the whole project. But at the end of the day, the questions the Social Entrepreneurship API raises remain: who is going to use it, and how should that influence its evolution?

The question of audience and adoption is not at all lost on the folks putting this project together. In fact, it's pretty clear -- both from their writing about these updates as well as the focus on customizable widgets that can be deployed across the web -- that adoption is their big focus.

They have laid out a number of scenarios about who this information will be useful for, including funders, journalists, researchers and early stage social entrepreneurs themselves.

Although the idea that this would be useful to funders has been at the heart of the sell of the Social Entrepreneurship API, I'm extremely skeptical that this will actually be a major use scenario. I just don't think that funders -- whether big-time or citizen philanthropists -- are sitting around wishing they could find social entrepreneurs, and lack only the right information.

This isn't just a skepticism I have about the API -- I think that the vast majority of online funding platforms for social good that exists tend to overestimate funder demand for their products, as I wrote about in the post "Are Social Investors Made, Or Born?"

I can, however, imagine that this tool could be useful for a narrow segment of donor-advised funds, wealth managers or family foundations with a small staff, if and when the new field of social entrepreneurship attracts them. I think it'd be great if the API had resources to target this specific section of the funding food chain.

But what's more promising to me is the utility of the API for journalism and research. On the journalism side, there are always news outlets popping up looking to explore this topic. So having an easy starting place that offers examples of who these mythical beasts known as "social entrepreneurs" really are might be genuinely useful. From the research point of view, there is a deficit of overarching information about the field -- again, because of its fragmentation. If the API can continue to add new partners, it could provide a great starting point for many a researcher.

Congrats to Social Edge, Social Actions, the search-builder team at Exygy and the rest of API's partners on their latest advancements!