Course Description
Social and environmental challenges are no longer addressed only by governments or charities. Today, nonprofits, startups, corporations, investors, and public agencies often work side by side — and sometimes inside the same organizations — to tackle problems like housing, health, climate, education, and economic opportunity.
This course is about how those organizations actually work.
You’ll learn how social sector organizations (including nonprofits and mission-driven businesses) design strategies, choose business models, raise and manage money, measure results, and make trade-offs between impact and financial sustainability. We’ll focus on the practical tools leaders use to decide what to do, how to do it, and how to grow what works.
Many of the basic management ideas you may already know — like marketing, operations, and competitive strategy — still apply. But managing for impact adds real complexity. Goals are harder to define, success is harder to measure, funding doesn’t always come from customers, and stakeholders often have very different priorities. These differences matter, and they shape almost every major decision leaders make.
This class is designed as a survey course. You won’t become an expert in every topic, but you will build a solid working understanding of how social ventures are structured and managed, and where the hardest challenges tend to arise. Whether you plan to work in the nonprofit sector, in government, in impact investing, or in a mission-driven company, the goal is for you to leave with a practical framework for thinking about how impact actually gets delivered — not just how it gets talked about.
Class Structure
This is a discussion-based, case-driven course. Most weeks, you’ll prepare cases and readings and then use class time to apply ideas, debate trade-offs, and practice making real-world decisions.
Across the quarter, we’ll cover how social sector organizations:
- Choose legal and organizational structures
- Design business and funding models
- Define their intended impact and theory of change
- Measure results and learn from data
- Work with boards and governance structures
- Think about growth, scale, partnerships, and systems change
When helpful, we’ll compare social ventures to traditional for-profit companies to highlight what’s similar — and what’s not. The goal is not just to understand the tools, but to understand when and why certain tools work better (or worse) in impact-driven settings.
By the end of the course, you should be able to look at a social sector organization and assess how well its strategy, funding, operations, and governance fit together — and whether those pieces are likely to support the impact the organization is trying to achieve.
