Blake Jennelle (The Blog)

This is the third post in a five-part series on missioneurs, a new community of startup and social entrepreneurs.

The premise is that startup entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs need each other. Alone, too many of their great ideas are struggling and failing. Together, they can fill in each other’s blind spots, build stronger companies and make greater change.

A new post in this series will be published every day this week. Blog subscribers will receive them one day early by email or RSS.

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Yesterday, we discussed the startup entrepreneur’s obsession with execution at the expense of ideas and the crippling effect this has on their marketing, sales and HR.

Now let’s talk about social entrepreneurs, who have the opposite problem:

Social entrepreneurs are obsessed with mission at the expense of execution.

This is a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because their mission can be a very faithful guide. It defines what services they provide, how they make decisions, how they communicate to donors and constituents and how they build their teams.

Social entrepreneurs don’t have to wake up every morning and ask themselves why they exist or what they are trying to achieve, as many startup entrepreneurs do. Their mission drives everything they do. When it doesn’t, they know they are doing something wrong.

Their mission is also a blessing because of all the perks that come with it. Donors give money without expecting it back. Recruits scratch and claw for an opportunity to make half the salary they would make at a startup. Clients write heart-wrenching thank you notes that get hung on the wall.

These are things that most startups would die for.

But the social entrepreneur’s mission is also a curse. It becomes an excuse for depending on handouts, trying to please too many people and giving up on the technologies that could help set them free.

When I say handouts, I mean the money given out by foundations, governments, private donors and kind-hearted individuals – people who aren’t the social entrepreneur’s clients but choose to finance them anyway.

It goes without saying that handouts are not reliable or predictable in a struggling economy. But even when they are, the dependence on handouts almost inevitably hurts the delivery of services – not to mention the mission – because it forces non-profits to divide their attention.

A non-profit has to answer to two entirely different audiences: the people they serve and the people who pay for it.

It’s like running two different businesses at the same time. Naturally it’s hard to be good at both, and most organizations are better at one than the other.

Mission can also be a crutch for other shortcomings of execution.

For all the great stories that social entrepreneurs have to share, many go unheard because they are not marketed properly. Like many startups, non-profits can’t afford traditional advertising and direct marketing. Yet unlike startups, social entrepreneurs are often allergic to technology, and so they can’t take advantage of the social and viral marketing tactics that would help their remarkable stories spread.

For example, Twitter is totally free to use, and yet there’s not a single non-profit is in the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers, as Seth Godin observed on his blog. Social entrepreneurs tend to be darlings of traditional media but they rarely venture outside of it.

The decision-making process at non-profits is another failure of execution. Bureaucracy and red tape tend to stifle innovation and drive out the innovators. Non-profits struggle to keep the same key people as startups but for a different reason. Startups fail to inspire them. Non-profits fail to listen to them.

Decision by committee, together with the mega committees that often run non-profits, make it unlikely that anything remarkable will make it out alive. Innovation almost always loses to a majority vote.

So the problem for social entrepreneurs is not their mission, because their mission is essential. The problem is when their mission becomes a crutch for poor execution.

That’s why startup entrepreneurs, with their obsession with execution, have so much to offer social entrepreneurs. That’s also why social entrepreneurs, with their obsession with mission, have so much to offer startups.

If only we can bring the two groups together.

Tomorrow, in part 4 of the series, we’ll describe what happens when we bring startup and social entrepreneurs together – and why the missioneurs that emerge can change the world. This fourth post is called, “Missioneurs: Entrepreneurs with both eyes open.”

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More articles in The Missioneur Series:

• Part #1: Our startups and non-profits don’t have to die
• Part #2: The one-eyed startup entrepreneur
• Part #3 (you are here): The one-eyed social entrepreneur
• Part #4: Missioneurs are entrepreneurs with both eyes open
• Part #5: Building the missioneurs community, together

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