The Social Ventures Australia (SVA) approach works. It builds stronger social purpose organisations (ventures) by providing them with a mixture of funding and support to increase their social impact. SVA identifies and engages with ventures who have a transformative idea and who will benefit from an active, hands-on partnership approach to assist them with the organisational change required to get there.

Since 2002, SVA has provided over $50 million in funding and support to over 88 social ventures. SVA applies a different lens to organisational change – the focus is working with the ventures and applying the SVA skillset and expertise to support them.

SVA suggests there are five key ingredients for successful partnerships when working towards organisational change:

1. Partnership goes both ways

A venture partnership is very different from other funding relationships as there is an obligation on both parties to give as well as receive, to help the other achieve its strategic objectives. Successful partnerships are when each organisation can see the benefit the other will get from the relationship and is willing to share knowledge, expertise and their experience to make it worthwhile. If both partners are clear about this from the outset then the partnership is set up for success.

2. Identify the ‘value’ in value add

While money is important, the main difference between venture philanthropy and other types of funding is the business support that accompanies it. Each venture requires something different to help it achieve its goals, whether it’s commercial sustainability, influencing government policy or improving the education outcomes of indigenous students. An effective partnership will involve aligning the expectations of both parties around what tailored support is needed.

SVA focuses on four areas of business support to help its venture partners achieve their intended social outcomes. The areas include improving their access to capital (through building a sustainable funding base), improving their access to talent (by recruiting and retaining a strong team and board to drive the organisation), building a strong evidence base to prove the outcomes of their work and tapping into strong networks and expertise to support them in their growth.

At the start of each partnership both organisations agree on where the business support efforts are best focused, with room to change these over time as the venture develops and faces different hurdles or challenges.

3. Flexibility is key

Just as business support is adapted over time to match the venture’s strategic needs, flexibility is also crucial within the venture. The venture’s leadership team must be willing and able to adapt as necessary as they implement their plans. As they drive towards their strategic goals, they also need to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves while learning lessons of what has worked or not worked along the way, and be willing to communicate when things are not working.

4. Honesty and trust

Honesty and trust are crucial components to a successful venture partnership. Time must be spent up front developing these, as each partnership needs to be based on mutual respect and an understanding of what each organisation wants to achieve from it. This can require fierce conversations with venture partners. Having these difficult conversations when things aren’t working for either party is a lot easier if both partners are confident in each other’s good intentions.

5. Prove your impact

Measuring impact is important for a venture’s continuous improvement, to understand what’s working and how to improve. It is also important for a venture to prove their impact to other stakeholders (including funders). SVA bases its approach on the key principles that underpin good impact measurement. These are: understanding what you want to change; engaging with stakeholders; being transparent; measuring what is relevant; not over-claiming; valuing the impact; and verifying the result. This principles-based approach enables us to support organisations to think about the impact they are seeking. It can be utilised in a service design approach or as an evaluation of what has worked.

STREAT case study

STREAT is a social enterprise based in inner Melbourne providing homeless and disadvantaged youth, aged 16–25, years with a supported pathway from the street to a sustainable livelihood.

Most of the young people that STREAT supports have no formal education or training qualifications, having left school before Year 10. With such diverse and complex needs, intensive and integrated support is required to equip these young people with the social and employment skills needed to lift them out of disadvantage. STREAT’s model focuses on young people having a stable self, job and home in order to thrive longer-term. To achieve this STREAT wraps a range of support avenues around each young person to help them progress.

Since the establishment of its first coffee cart in 2010, STREAT has grown rapidly and now operates seven foodservice businesses in Melbourne – five city cafes, a coffee roastery, and a catering company. STREAT is building a scalable social enterprise model. The organisation is now 70 per cent self-funded and is on track to reach 100 per cent in 2017.

STREAT came into the SVA venture portfolio in 2010 and instantly saw the power of partnership working with us to help them grow. They have leveraged the initial partnership to engage a range of corporate partners to support their work and also look at the potential for significant impact investing to assist them to grow. SVA’s consulting team has worked with STREAT around their impact measurement approach and enabled them to embed this into their work. STREAT value SVA as a partner and utilise us in an advisory role across a range of areas.