#SocEntChat, the Twitter Chat on Social Entrepreneurship

The following is a guest post by Tom Dawkins, Digital Marketing Strategist of Ashoka.

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Twitter is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs, activists and researchers to share their stories, ideas and causes, building tribes of followers who can help them in their missions. #SocEntChat uses twitter as a platform to bring these people together, convening monthly real-time forums to help identify promising initiatives and techniques, connect with possible allies and partners and share knowledge and insights.

I initiated #SocEntChat (short of Social Entrepreneur Chat) as part of my role as Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka, an international citizen-sector organization founded by Bill Drayton, often called “the father of social entrepreneurship,” which seeks to create an Everyone a Changemaker world. After 28 years of supporting leading social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries and building infrastructure to support changemakers we see an incredibly important part of our mission as convening social entrepreneurs and their supporters to help accelerate change.

So the question I asked myself as I launched our account @AshokaTweets earlier this year was, how could Twitter help us further this mission? After having been inspired by the success of the weekly #Journchat discussions, which focus on how technology is impacting journalism and PR, we made the decision to use our networks to host an equivalent monthly event for social entrepreneurs. Nathaniel Whittemore, social entrepreneurship blogger at Change.org agreed to be my co-host and the first #SocEntChat was held in April to try and capture the learnings from the Skoll World Forum. Since then we have covered Social Entrepreneurship on Campuses and Green Entrepreneurship. You can read the transcripts here, here, and here. You can also read the reflections from David Strelneck, coordinator of Green Initiatives at Ashoka, on the last #SocEntChat here.

We have been thrilled by the response and the quality of the conversations help so far. Despite the severe length limitations of Twitter the discussions have reached a surprising depth, whether in considering how new voices could be heard at the Skoll World Forum, how to better connect students and off-campus communities or the best role for Government in fostering green innovation.

This Wednesday from 4-6pm US EDT (GMT-4) we’ll explore the exciting possibilities of Mobile Innovation, a week after Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation co-hosted an event in Nairobi Kenya on this topic. Innovation in the use of mobile technologies for social change are leaping rapidly ahead, whether in the form of The Extraordinaries use of smart phones for volunteering, using SMS to share the daily price of goods at market so that rural farmers in Africa get a better deal or mobile phones being used for banking in the absence of more traditional  financial infrastructure.

I hope you’ll join us!

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Tom Dawkins joined Ashoka in September last year as Digital Marketing Strategist. For more info on Ashoka see www.ashoka.org. More details on how to participate in #SocEntChat can be found at www.squidoo.com/socentchat. #SocEntChat takes place the first Wednesday of each month from 4-6pm US Eastern Daylight Time.

• Invests in social entrepreneurs around the world who have innovative, sustainable and replicable solutions to society’s most pressing social problems.
• Organization Type: Non-Profit
• Website: www.ashoka.org
• Founder(s): Bill Drayton
• Founded: 1980
• Location: Washinton, DC, United States