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About This Resource

Venture criteria are a set of predefined conditions that outline the requirements that must be met for an Employment Social Enterprise (ESE) venture to be successful.

Venture criteria help ESEs make data-driven decisions most likely to achieve their goals and mission. This Venture Criteria Bank & Template Tool can be used for ESEs to generate, refine, and prioritize a set of venture criteria that will enable them to meet their business, social, and operational goals. This tool can be used to evaluate the potential of new growth opportunities and existing business lines as well, but throughout this tool, we will use the word ‘opportunity’ for consistency.

Within this download you can find the following:

  • Overview & Instructions: this tab describes what venture criteria are, their purpose, and how to use this too
  • Key Questions: a set of questions for your team to collaboratively reflect on to begin to identify venture criteria
  • Venture Criteria Bank: a robust list of venture criteria across social, operational, and financial categories
  • Venture Criteria Template: a template for ESEs to use to develop and use their own venture criteria, including a weighting system to prioritize and opportunity’s performance against criteria
  • Illustrative Example: a mock example of a completed template; note the venture criteria scores are not based on real data and meant only to illustrate how to use the template
  • Lists & assumptions: lists used for drop-down options and assumptions in the weighting system