Part 2: How to Create a Simple Journey Map Let’s say you’ve built a persona like Maria, as previously described. Now how does she move through her day? How does she get from leaving work exhausted to sitting down to dinner with her family? What problems, challenges, and frustrations does she encounter along the way?… Continue reading Journey Mapping for Social Entrepreneurs
Tag: Design Thinking for Social Impact
Journey Mapping for Social Entrepreneurs
Part 1: What a Journey Map Is (and Why It Matters) As you plan for your social enterprise, you’ve covered a lot of ground already. You’ve done interviews, reflected on the broader community context, and created a persona grounded in real research. You now know how your community partners move through their day, make decisions… Continue reading Journey Mapping for Social Entrepreneurs
Personas:
How to Turn Deep-Dive Research into Human Insight In the previous post, we explored what personas are and why they matter in social entrepreneurship and design thinking. This post focuses on the practical question: how do you create a persona from your deep-dive research? Remember Maria from Part 1? She’s not a real person, but… Continue reading Personas:
Creating Personas in Your Deep Dive:
A Practical Guide for Social Entrepreneurs What if you could use your deep dive research to sketch a realistic portrait of your ideal client? Then you could design with a specific type of person in mind, rather than a fuzzy abstraction. You could design for someone with a schedule, competing priorities, and a life that… Continue reading Creating Personas in Your Deep Dive:
Identifying Community Assets:
Simple First Steps Before Your Deep Dive Many founders start by asking, “What’s broken?” This is a logical question but also try flipping it. Also look at “What’s strong?” You may save time and earn trust before your first interview. Sometimes the most important early insights come from pausing. This post adds one idea to… Continue reading Identifying Community Assets:
When Interviews Go Astray:
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them Even the best-planned empathy interviews sometimes take wrong turns. You may prepare carefully, yet still find things don’t go as planned. Maybe your questions don’t come out the way you hoped, your interviewee gives short answers, or the conversation suddenly feels tense. That’s normal. Interviewing is a skill… Continue reading When Interviews Go Astray:
Interviewing for Empathy and Information
(Part 1: What and Why) Let’s say you’ve got a great idea for a social enterprise. Maybe it’s an app to help people manage stress, or a solution for food insecurity in your community. You’ve done your homework for this project. You’ve searched online, crunched the numbers, and used AI tools to gather facts. But… Continue reading Interviewing for Empathy and Information
Finding the Sweet Spot
Around the world, 15 million preterm and underweight babies born every year aren’t able to regulate their own body temperature and will die without support. In the developed world, modern hospitals have state-of-the-art incubators where these newborns can grow safely until they are ready for a world much colder than the womb. In the developing… Continue reading Finding the Sweet Spot
What Is Social
What Is Social Entrepreneurship and Why It Matters Now A Problem Worth Solving As a biochemistry student at Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, Isabel Pulido never imagined she’d tackle global food security through refrigeration. Her inspiration struck during a visit to a rural community, where she watched a mother throw away half-eaten food simply… Continue reading What Is Social
Colder Ice:
Isabel Pulido’s Cool Innovation One afternoon in rural Colombia, Isabel Pulido watched a mother throw away half-eaten beans and rice. The family had no refrigerator—not because they couldn’t afford one, but because they had no reliable electricity. “I realized then that the biggest problem wasn’t just access to power,” Pulido recalls. “It was about food… Continue reading Colder Ice: