Social Traders has released Sustainable impact: How NFPs are building social enterprises that pay their way, (written by James Hornitzky and Dr Amber Earles) alongside a webinar unpacking the findings. It looks at four Australian NFPs that have built social enterprises able to generate their own trade revenue while delivering social impact.
The report is worth reading in full. It is not a formula, and it is upfront about its limitations: these are four successful case studies, not a representative sample of every NFP-led social enterprise. But its core finding aligns closely with what we see across Harvey's clients.
Impactful businesses have to provide real value, be sustainable and profitable, and compete with great products, brands and experiences. Purpose does not replace those fundamentals. It gives them a bigger reason to exist.
This is music to our ears. We encourage our clients to apply it to everything we do, from customer research and positioning to packaging, websites, eCom and marketing. A better world needs businesses that can keep going, keep improving and win customers on their merits. Three key outtakes we'd highlight:
- Make something people choose
- Build a business that lasts
- Compete to create mores impact
Social Traders' 2025 sector research found that 71% of social enterprises that increased trade revenue also increased their spending on impact. Trade revenue is not separate from impact. It is what allows impact to continue when grants, donations or funding priorities change.
1. Make something people choose
A mission can make someone more likely to choose you. It rarely makes up for an unclear offer, a difficult buying process or something that does not meet a real need.
The social enterprises in the report understood this. The catering business needed to deliver great catering. The HR compliance business had to be faster and easier than the alternatives. The op shops needed to be useful, welcoming places to visit. The cleaning business needed to be reliable.
KOSI is a strong example from our own work. KOSI Cocoa was created to support Solomon Islands village livelihoods and improve crop resilience. But to work, it also needed to be a drinking chocolate people would choose over established imported brands such as Milo. In-country research, product testing and packaging trials informed the flavour, product range and campaign. The result was a locally made product built around genuine customer preference, not goodwill alone.
The same discipline applies to services. For Peninsula Hot Springs, research combining customer surveys with 1.7 million historical bookings helped identify distinct audiences, what they value and what stops them visiting. Those insights informed visitor experience, targeting, messaging, brand and website decisions.
Before investing heavily in a new venture or campaign, we would ask:
- Who is the paying customer, and what are they trying to solve?
- What do they use instead today?
- Why would they choose this offer on quality, convenience, price or expertise?
- Is the impact story making a good decision easier, or doing all the work?
This is where customer research earns its keep. It tests assumptions before they become expensive.
2. Build a business that lasts
The report is clear that sustainability takes time. None of the case studies reached it quickly. Leaders focused on unit economics before expanding, and funding needed to match the stage of the enterprise: seed funding to begin, then patient capacity-building funding to improve the model, systems and capability.
For employment-focused social enterprises in particular, the added cost of training, support and flexibility is part of the impact model. The job is not to remove it. It is to understand it, fund it honestly and create enough customer value to carry as much of that cost as possible.
Customer experience is part of this commercial infrastructure. A business loses money and time when customers cannot understand the offer, find the right product, enquire, book, buy or reorder easily.
With Hara, we turned a thoughtful new brand into a faster, accessible and scalable Shopify experience. Better navigation, sizing, product pages, pre-order clarity and an in-cart bundle builder make it easier for customers to buy and for the team to manage and grow the store.
With Merry People, we have worked through years of practical eCom improvements: clearer product information, country selection, sizing support, back-in-stock alerts, checkout improvements and measurement. Merry People is not a social enterprise in the same way as KOSI or Pixii, but the commercial lesson is the same. Small, tested improvements to the customer journey can create more repeat revenue and reduce operational friction.
Tierra shows the same principle in retail. As the business grew from market stalls into a retail store and eCom, it needed a brand and packaging system that could retain its warmth and provenance while working efficiently across more than 300 rotating products. The right system protects quality while making growth more manageable.
3. Compete to create more impact
Purpose-led businesses do not need to choose between being principled and being competitive. In fact, the more clearly they compete, the more capacity they have to deliver their purpose.
Pixii is a useful example. Its purpose is advancing gender equity by making period products available in the places people work and learn. But its core customer value proposition is not just “buy from us because we are a social enterprise”. It is “Plastic-free pads & tampons made easy for organisations.” That gives workplace champions and building managers a clear, practical reason to act. The environmental and social impact, product quality, service and credibility strengthen the decision.
For The Sociable Weaver, the work was about making exceptional sustainable homes, proven performance and impact reporting easier for prospective clients to understand. A clearer brand, a more useful website and accessible evidence of environmental outcomes help the business compete in an industry where many of the most important benefits are hard to see at first glance.
That is the role of a great brand. It does not paper over a weak offer. It makes a strong offer understandable, memorable and easier to choose. It connects the commercial proposition with the wider purpose, without asking customers to decode an organisation chart or take the impact claims on faith.
The report's other lessons still matter
Social Traders identifies experienced leadership, strategic volunteers, patient funding and an evolving relationship between the parent NFP and social enterprise as the other foundations of sustainability. They are not branding or marketing problems to solve in isolation.
But they are exactly why a commercial lens matters. Good leadership needs evidence to make decisions. Volunteers need useful systems and clear roles. Funders need a credible path from investment to trade revenue. And parent organisations need a brand architecture and customer experience that makes the relationship between purpose and trade clear.
We have found these truths to hold for all of our clients. Whether the impact is village livelihoods, gender equity, healthier homes, more sustainable products or better access to wellbeing, businesses create more change when people actively choose what they offer.
If you are building, testing or growing a social enterprise and want to better understand your customers, clarify your offer or improve the path from interest to revenue, get in touch with us.
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