Digital marketing and communication for social enterprises

Abstract

To understand how social enterprises use digital tools to market their offerings to digitally connected stakeholders, we conducted interviews with eight Indian social entrepreneurs. We find that digital tools offer a vehicle for enabling interaction with different stakeholders. This interactivity helps social enterprises in many ways: (i) in personalizing and co-creating their offerings, (ii) building trust among key stakeholders by showcasing transparency and authenticity, and (iii) spreading good words to a wider audience in a cost-effective way. This study reveals that social enterprises use innovative ways such as using an app to maintain transparency about their offerings and operations or showcasing their social impact and offerings through digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and their websites. For instance, videos featuring their innovative offerings and initiatives can go viral through apps like Whatsapp and let people know about these organizations. Our results highlight that the digital marketing tools are more suitable for social enterprises as they face challenges such as lack of resources and well-established distribution setup. These insights are important as the social entrepreneurs can take note of these innovative approaches and build upon these to uncover new ways to use digital medium to their advantage. We offer few research directions that may require additional exploration.