Activity
Use the template below to apply the social BMC to your organisation:
Link to Blank Social BMC Template.
Breakdown
To support you with this task, here are some prompts for each of the nine segments of the social BMC:
- Social value relates to your organisation’s mission that focuses on creating benefit for its stakeholders and society.
- Employee looks at the role of employees as a core organisational stakeholder.
- Elements include how many and what type of employees you have.
- Relevant demographics, e.g., variations in pay, gender, ethnicity, and education.
- As with the environmental BMC, focus only on the most relevant for supporting your organisation’s business model.
- Governance refers to your organisations ownership, structure, and decision making. E.g.,
- Ownership might be cooperative, not-for-profit, privately owned for-profit, publicly traded for-profit, etc.
- Internal structure might be organisational hierarchy, functional or unit specialisation, etc.
- Decision making may be transparent, consultative, non-financial criteria, profit sharing, etc.
- Communities is referring to the social relationships you build with your suppliers and your local communities. Developing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships greatly influence your organisations’ success.
- Societal culture recognises the potential impact of your organisation on society. How, through your organisation’s actions, it can positively influence society.
- Scale of outreach is the depth and breadth of the relationships your organisation builds with its stakeholders through your organisation’s actions over time.
- This includes long term relationships.
- Geographical outreach (local, regional, or global).
- Societal differences.
- End-users ‘consume’ your value proposition. Think about how your value proposition addresses the end-user’s needs, e.g., how does it contribute to their quality of life? As with employees, end-users can be segmented into different demographics, e.g., age, income, ethnicity, education level, etc.
- Social impacts are the social costs of an organisation. Common indicators include working hours, cultural heritage, health and safety, community engagement, fair competition, respect of intellectual property rights, etc. However, which ones to focus on likely depends on the nature of your organisation, and you may find the need to create your own indicators here.
- Social benefits: refer to the positive social value created by your organisation’s actions. As with social impacts, social benefits can be measured using a broad range of indicators.
Exemplar
If you need help, have a look at the social BMC that has been completed for Origin Coffee below:
Link to Completed Origin Coffee Social BMC
Module 5
To move onto Module 5, mark this module as complete by clicking on the green button below.
Adapted from Joyce, A. and Paquin, R.L., 2016. The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable business models. Journal of cleaner production, 135, pp.1474-1486.
