NOTE: This article was originally published on July 14, 2015 on The Changer blog. It has been cross-posted with permission from The Changer.

These videos are presented in collaboration with the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).

Ryan Little is a seasoned social and environmental entrepreneur, Project Manager at the BMW Foundation, and co-founder of the Canadian charitable giving platform, CanadaHelps, the country’s national resource for online giving, capacity building, and social media best practices. The organization has facilitated over $600 million in donations since its establishment in 2000. At the BMW Foundation, Little heads the venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship initiatives, does extensive across-organization advising, and coordinates for social startups at the German Startups Association.

In these videos, you’ll find Ryan’s personal tips and tricks for creating and sustaining a viable social business, from securing funding for your venture to forecasting trends in social entrepreneurship and responding appropriately to the ever-shifting landscape of the social sector. Watch and learn!

1. How to Get Funding for Your Social Business

In this video, Ryan offers valuable tips on pitching to investors and fundraising for your social business. He emphasizes that it is essential to have a clear and succinct story that focuses on your unique solution to a problem and lays out why you are the right person for the job. For more insider tips, watch the video.

This is an exciting time for RECODE—as the work on campuses across Canada continues to ramp up, we are developing ways in which we can effectively evaluate and measure the impact of this work. Our guiding question has been “what will success look like?”. To help us answer it, we have developed anticipated desired outcomes, but we also recognize there will be many unknowns. RECODE is working within a broader system of higher education that is also complex; accordingly, our evaluation framework has to be designed and adapted in consequence.

Tim Draimin, Social Innovation Generation‘s Executive Director, recently suggested that I read The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley. The book explores the role of human nature and human networks in creating change and innovation, positing that to truly affect change we need to better understand the role of ‘keystones’. In biological systems, whether a rainforest or an ocean, keystone species often act as central supporting hubs. They interact in so many valuable ways with so many other parts of the ecosystem, that their presence has a disproportionate impact on the system (pg. 70). Think of the role of the pollinating bee in our food system, and you’ll get an idea of the importance of keystone species.

As we pass the six month mark of RECODE, we are seeing the emergence of stories, learnings, and stumbling blocks that need to be shared with the larger community. With this in mind, we are launching the RECODE blog to serve as one of the many pathways to engage the national RECODE network and interested stakeholders, to generate, diffuse, and deepen our collective efforts.

This blog will serve as a conversation starter and platform to illuminate the journey of fueling social innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education in Canada. This may include storytelling from our institutional champions and partners, community impact learnings, or sharing a breakthrough model for financing emerging social innovations on campus.

Over the past year, we have had the pleasure of working with Intel on systems mapping, which involves crowdsourcing information gathered through their meticulously designed surveys and then sharing the data visually in partnership with Vibrant Data. Through this initiative, we have been fortunate to work with Intel’s Tony Salvador—engineer, social scientist, and most of all, a wonderful humanist. Below, Tony takes us into his world of mapping systems with RECODE.

It’s so totally cool that Canadians would consider it right and reasonable to come together to consider a question of national interest such as how to catalyze a new culture of innovation throughout the country.

At issue for us, as researchers at Intel working on systems mapping tools, is how to have the conversation in the best possible way, so that all voices are heard and that perspectives are aired to discover the wheat amidst the chaff. We find it very useful to think about Canada not just as a country or a thing like a donut, but rather as a system of interacting people, thoughts, actions, policies, and sentiments. In fact, we find it very useful to think about Canada as a complex, socio-technical system from which emerges order based on individual actions (and inactions). But as a complex system, individual actions are often not predictive of the emergent properties of the system.