Social Enterprise Resources

SoCal Regional TA Program

Overview

Bringing over 20 years of expertise in the employment social enterprise sector, REDF is looking to continue building the field of transitional social enterprises within Southern California through a new program. The SoCal Regional TA Program offers employment social enterprises throughout the region an opportunity to apply for specialized technical assistance projects that focus on business growth, employee outcomes, or organization sustainability.

While the main goal of this program is to enhance employment social enterprises’ overall capacity, we are also excited to build a potential pipeline for other REDF programming such as: LA:RISE, Venture Philanthropy Portfolio, Impact Loans, Strategic Grants, and the REDF Accelerator.

Examples of our services include:

Business Growth

  • Business Development
  • Market Analysis
  • New Business Feasibility Analysis
  • Strategy

Employee Outcomes

  • Employee Supports Strategy
  • Program Design
  • Recruitment and Placement Strategy

Sustainability

  • Data Capture and Analysis
  • Hiring Support
  • Operations Mapping
  • Systems Implementation Support

Readiness Checklist

To benefit from a REDF TA project, your organization will need the following in place before working with us:

☑  Reviewed the Technical Assistance Menu below to ensure REDF is a good fit

☑  Located in one of the following SoCal Counties

      • Los Angeles County
      • Orange County
      • San Bernardino County
      • Riverside County
      • San Diego County

☑  501(c)3 non-profit organization status

☑  Interested in starting or growing a employment social enterprise

☑  Currently serve/employ or plan to serve/employ from any of the target populations below

      • Homeless or History of Homelessness
      • Opportunity Youth (18-24-year olds who are disconnected from both school and work)
      • History of arrest, connection, or incarceration
      • Mental Illness, substance abuse
      • Multiple-barriers

☑ Willing to submit REDF reports twice a year for one year. Reports would include data in the following areas: people employed demographics, finances, benchmarking information, and program/business line updates.

 

Interest Form

Before expressing interest in a project, please review our Readiness Checklist above to ensure that our TA program is the right fit and will benefit your organization. If you have any questions about this form, please email Trini Rios.

Visit here to complete the interest form.

Technical Assistance Menu

Programmatic Technical Assistance Topics

 

Topic Expected technical assistance and potential deliverables Prerequisites
Bolstering recruitment
  • Process diagram of current recruitment process
  • Analysis of potential pain-points and barriers in current process
  • Strategies for increasing quantity and quality (i.e., fidelity to the social enterprises target population) of potential participant inflow (e.g., identifying high-quality referral partners)
  • Demonstrate need to improve recruitment efforts either to fulfill LA:RISE contract or fulfill business demand
Program design insight
  • Series of strategic discussions with expert consultant on programs
  • Basic program design document summarizing key elements of desired program model
  • None
Program design revamp
  • Analysis of existing program design (document) by expert consultant
  • Revised program design document reflecting updated thinking and changes
  • Existing program design and/or program design document
Program documentation
  • Fully-fleshed out program design document for groups with formalized program in place but no clear summary document explaining program
  • Existing program design
Service delivery gap assessment
  • Visual or written map of services offered to participants
  • Analysis of potential service gaps: where/how else do participants require support?
  • Identification of strategies to fill gaps: referral partners, low-cost service-delivery options, etc.
  • None
Retention data analysis and strategy
  • Analyze existing retention data to understand pain-points and opportunities for improvement (e.g., via benchmarking data from other similar programs)
  • Analyze existing retention tracking process; provide suggestions for improvement
  • Identify potential retention support providers
  • New SE serving as a PSP in LA:RISE model
  • Retention data currently being tracked; retention data available
Retention program setup
  • Process diagram for potential retention tracking program (i.e., who gets tracked, which staff tracks, questions asked, frequency of check-ins, etc.)
  • Retention data dashboard for ongoing analysis
  • New SE serving as a PSP in LA:RISE model

Business Technical Assistance Topics

 

Topic Expected technical assistance and potential deliverables Prerequisites
Pre-feasibility analysis
  • Create list of deal-breaker criteria with leadership team to understand the minimum requirements for launching a new business line; we call these “venture criteria”
  • Assemble list of potential business models that meet venture criteria
  • Provide ~2-5 recommendations of business models to fully vet with suggested next steps
  • None
Market analysis
  • For a given product or service, determine market size (called “total addressable market”), growth, barriers to entry, leading competitors, and customer types
  • None
Unit cost analysis
  • Create a unit cost model (or analyze existing data) to determine the marginal cost of producing one additional unit of product or service
  • None
Breakeven analysis
  • Breakeven cost model (i.e., where breakeven volume = fixed costs / [price less variable unit cost]) to identify volume and/or price levels needed to generate profit = $0
  • Unit cost model or unit cost data
Market-rate pricing analysis
  • Analysis of current market pricing rates for given products, services, or customer types, allowing the social enterprise to understand how far above/below they are from current rates
  • None
Pricing analysis
  • Margin calculator or pricing tool (e.g., for quick quote-generation)
  • Margin analysis by customer, channel, or product segment
  • Analysis of gross margin changes over time due to price, volume, COGS, discounts, and product mix
  • Unit cost data depending on rigor of analysis
Operations documentation
  • Document ongoing business operations procedures (with deliverable generally in the form of a Standard Operation Procedure manual)
  • Provide high-level recommendations on how to address identified pain-points within business operations procedures
  • Have existing set of operations procedures already in use
Sales strategy
  • Recommended sales structure (e.g., staffing, compensation, product purview, etc.)
  • Documentation of current or revised sales process
  • None
Customer outreach
  • Customer calls and/or surveys for both existing and prospective customers
  • None

Programmatic and Business Technical Assistance Topics

 

Topic Expected technical assistance and potential Deliverables Prerequisites
Double-bottom-line accounting
  • Disaggregate existing P&L statement into business-related revenues and expenses (e.g., earned revenue, most COGS) and social-related revenues and expenses (e.g., grants, case managers) to better understand operational performance and to enhance future fundraising
  • Existing P&L statements – ideally over more than one time period
Communications & marketing strategy
  • Refine marketing and/or branding pitch for program, business, or both
  • Recommendations on how to build outreach (e.g., via emails, social, list-building, etc.)
  • None