048, Astrid Scholz, Sphaera | Unleashing $100 Billion in Value for Social Impact

If there were ever an industry that is ripe for disruption, it’s what we might call the social change industry – charitable organizations, NGOs, government organizations and other change makers. That’s primarily because of inefficiencies of information across the industry. If only someone would come along to collapse the barriers to collaboration, think how much more social impact we could have.

There is a number attached to that inefficiency in the social impact marketplace, and that number is $100 billion.

Sphaera is a social enterprise dedicated to accelerating the pace of change. They offer a cloud-based solution-sharing platform. They collect and curate solutions (best practices, case studies, interventions, etc.) and make them accessible to other solution-seekers around the world.

Today on Social Entrepreneur, we speak with Astrid Scholz. Astrid began Sphaera out of a personal pain. As part of a 20th year celebration with an NGO where she worked, they brought together 50 bioregional organizations. They soon realized just how many solutions they had among themselves, most of which were locked up behind firewalls. They decided to do something about it.

It was from this desire for collaboration across social enterprises that Sphaera was born.

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Astrid Scholz:

“We said, what if we started by making it easy and rewarding for practitioners everywhere to discover, share and reuse existing solutions?”

“It’s about surfacing the abundance of solutions and putting them into the hands of practitioners.”

“It turns out that that behavior, in aggregate, creates a $100 billion inefficiency in the social change industry.”

“Every time in history that an industry has exhibited information asymmetries, it’s eventually disrupted.”

“There’s something really interesting going on culturally and technologically that makes this the right time to try something very different in our industry.”

“The more services we sell, the more aggressively we act like any other enterprise SaaS company, the more social good we create.”

“Find a real world problem and a real organization that may need your help.”

“Trust the pain that you are feeling.”

“I was solving a pain and I ended up with a business.”

“I believe in the competitive advantage of collaboration.”

“You have to be authentic and aligned with your values in every single thing you do.”

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:   Sphaera: http://www.sphaera.world Twitter: https://twitter.com/SphaeraInc Medium: https://medium.com/@ajscholz Book: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World: http://amzn.to/1oCx3ev Book: The Responsible Entrepreneur: Four Game-Changing Archetypes for Founders, Leaders, and Impact Investors: http://amzn.to/1oCwRvR eBook: Five Key Traits of Successful Social Entrepreneurs: http://tonyloyd.com/socent Try Audible and Receive Two Free Audiobooks: http://tonyloyd.com/books