The different testimonials that you have just heard have shown you that entrepreneurs of change can raise various types of funding depending on their economic models, what stage of development their project is at, and the extent of their needs. They can turn to conventional forms of funding or forms of funding specific to social and solidarity
economies. We will study these forms more specifically in this chapter. Two key questions will enable us to choose forms of funding suited to your project and needs. The first question: can you repay the funds raised from your financiers? If the answer is no, I invite you to think about things with this little quiz. What funding could you turn to? Public grants. Bank loans. Crowd funding. Sponsorship. None, meaning you have to abandon your project. So there are options. You can look for non-repayable funds. In particular, the options available to you include public grants, crowdfunding, sponsorship. And above all, do not give up on your project. Let us start with public assistance, grants and funds available depending on the different phases of development of your project. At the launch phase, look at startup assistance mechanisms, such as France Active, BPI France, the European Social Fund or grants that you may be entitled to. In France, Pôle Emploi is the primary source of funding for projects at the launch stage. Then, it could be funds raised from friends and family: in other words crowdfunding or Love Money, or wider interest groups who share the same passion and are willing to fund a project that makes sense for them. For a few years now we have seen the emergence of on-line crowdfunding platforms allowing projects to be jointly financed by individuals. You can listen to Adrien Aumont, founder of Kiss Kiss Bank Bank, describing the various forms of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is expanding rapidly and is well suited to raising the funds needed to launch a project. So rally round your communities, be creative with the rewards you offer in return, and launch your project. Finally among non-repayable forms of funding, you can turn to sponsorship from companies, foundations or private sponsors who are persuaded by your social aims or impact. Sponsors provide funding without expecting to be paid or reimbursed. However, you should still take time to consider what value you can bring to the companies that back you, and what benefit you can offer them in return. This may go beyond benefits purely in terms of image, i.e. sponsorship as opposed to patronage. Let us come back to our initial question. If the answer is yes, you can secure credit from banking institutions or funding networks. Be aware that loans are available with conditions that are designed for or favourable to social entrepreneurs or micro-entrepreneurs: Initiative France, Réseau Entreprendre, BPI, France Active or Adie, for example. The second question: what share of interest in your company can you grant to your financiers, to what extent do you wish to remain independent or involve them in your decision-making? Investors provide capital in exchange for shares in your company. A form of investment called Impact Investing offers forms of investment particularly suitable for social enterprises. Priority is given to a company's social purpose and impact, and the expectation of financial return is moderate. Have a listen to Nicolas Celier's account of his experience of setting up the venture capital fund Investir & +. This "plus", as you will hear, is particularly important for project leaders. It involves the advice, networking and support offered by investors to make your project succeed. I am a partner in a venture capital fund that finances young innovative start-ups and 5 years ago, we realised that project leaders, entrepreneurs were getting younger and younger a few years ago we saw projects coming to us that were very different from the projects that we usually saw, projects with the distinguishing feature of being projects that above all brought a social impact and before being economically profitable and sustainable. This new generation of entrepreneurs also had tools at its disposal that, with the emergence of new technologies, were less and less expensive and more and more suitable for solving the problems that could not be solved previously. And so I thought of offering, putting together, on a more or less exploratory basis, a venture capital fund within our conventional venture capital fund, thinking, well it's a new economy, it's a new type of company. Moreover, it makes sense, for our investors, to contribute for those who are fairly socially oriented, many are cooperative organisations, or BPI, who have social DNA, it makes sense for them to take part in these ventures, in terms of communicating with the entrepreneurial community, it was good for us too. And then ultimately, talking with my partners, some felt that it was important to avoid mixing styles, and they suggested that I spent a little of my spare time contributing towards setting up a social venture capital fund. That was how I found 4 people who shared the same vision and we ended up setting up Investir & +. What is Investir & +? It is a fund which will provide capital funding to companies that are primarily looking... young companies that wish to have a significant social impact and which, secondarily, aim to achieve profitability in the short to medium term in order to remain sustainable and be able to maximise this social impact. Very soon, we had... the first few years were a little difficult because we said to ourselves, isn't it difficult enough already to fund start-ups: even start-ups not looking for social impact have a fairly risky journey, many fail and we thought, are we not piling on another huge difficulty by requiring these start-ups to be primarily social prior to reaching profitability. And the first few years were fairly tricky. And then we saw the emergence of new classes of entrepreneurs, many from new technologies, be it new media platforms for the evangelism of social entrepreneurship, all the positive news, be it platforms for taking, identifying young people in difficulty, unemployed, mainly from the suburbs, teach them to code, there's a severe shortage of IT skills in France, particularly in new languages, platforms allowing small associations to make themselves known on the web and use social networks to raise money from a class, a whole class, of young people in particular, who are connected online. We saw a new class of start-ups spring up, and thankfully were able to make a few investments and the wheels were set in motion. What we realised was that people didn't need money so much, money isn't so much what they come to us for, because at the end of the day money is for those projects that are at a crossroads between business and social, find money, but what these young entrepreneurs are looking for is more the network of entrepreneurs and shareholders that we make available to them, and the
entrepreneur, especially the social entrepreneur, is very lonely, they're a bit...
they're paving the way for a new model of society and it's very important for them to have the support of more experienced entrepreneurs, of people who can introduce them to clients, challenge them, who have experience of marketing, PR, finance, and it was really... that was where the real reason lay, and that's what people came to us for.
