Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes at a time. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this episode, we’re talking about a few businesses that are trying to do good while also making a profit.
But first, let me ask you this:
In your opinion, can a company turn a profit and be socially responsible at the same time?
In this episode, we’re using Danish startup Be My Eyes as a case study for a social enterprise business model.
What is a social enterprise? It is a startup or a company whose business model is to make a profit while providing a social or environmental product or service.
Be My Eyes launched a free app to connects visually-impaired people to volunteers who offer them visual assistance through a live video.
As of November 2019, there were three million volunteers from over 150 countries on the app. These volunteers are helping people with vision problems manage daily tasks such as reading documents, finding a pedestrian crosswalk to cross the street safely or even filling in forms.
Companies can also use Be My Eyes to improve customer support for people who are blind or have a visual impairment. Be My Eyes doesn’t charge its users, but it does charge companies that want to use the app for their customer support departments.
It’s important to point out that there is a difference between social enterprises and NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Social enterprises are for profit, while NGOs operate as a not-for-profit organization.
In this lesson, we’ll teach you eight Business English terms you need to know to talk about social entrepreneurship.
A few words we’ll talk about are:
- to be driven
- to leverage
- social impact
Here’s the episode audio.
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If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up below to get the episode transcript for free. We’ll also let you know when we release new episodes, and we’ll give you access to ten free Business English audio lessons and worksheets.
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Image credits: Simone Hutsch on Unsplash
