The Big Venture Challenge is a national competition to find the 25 most ambitious social entrepreneurs in England, which UnLtd and the Big Lottery Fund have launched to fill the ‘missing middle’ of the social investment marketplace.

Bright One will be providing access to a PR team for each Big Venture Challenge winner.

Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One, said:

We’re delighted to offer our support to the next generation of leading social enterprises in the UK. The social enterprise sector grows year on year thanks to the ideas and vision of ambitious social entrepreneurs across the country. The importance of communicating how this is a different way of doing business is essential, and we look forward to helping social enterprises get their message across and differentiate from themselves to grow the sector even further.

The fund, which opened for applications on Monday 9 May, will provide £175,000 to 25 social entrepreneurs with ‘rapidly scalable’ ventures.

Winners of Big Venture Challenge will get an initial £25K grant and the chance to access up to £150K of seed funding if matched by loans or equity from co-investors, plus first class business support and mentoring designed to keep pace with high growth social entrepreneurs.

Those interested in applying can download the application form here or for more information visit their website at www.bigventurechallenge.com

The SHINE UnConference for Social Entrepreneurs took place last weekend at The Hub Kings Cross in London.

We were there for the first day and had what can only be described as an inspirational time. Being surrounded by those both interested in engaging with and supporting social enterprise gave the event a momentum that we’re sure many took back into their everyday lives – many of whom will be running social enterprises.

We were on a panel in the morning called ‘Question Time’, which was billed as  “a question-and-answer session with some inspirational social entrepreneurs”. The panel was hosted by Cliff Prior, CEO of UnLtd, who did a great job of facilitating the discussion between Ben Ramsden of Pants to Poverty, Davina Roberts of Punch & Juicy,and Annys Darkwa of Vision Housing. Needless to say, we were honoured to be sat alongside such fantastic social entrepreneursand hope that we gave out lots of useful advice from our own jourey so far. You can read what Nick Temple, one of the ‘social reporters’ at the event, thought of the panel here.

We even got to do a bit of social reporting ourselves, helping people to find their way around Shine and letting people who couldn’t attend the event follow along via Twitter.

We also hosted a session in the afternoon. Called ‘Social Media Media Easy’, the panel session brought together a group of online social media champions and saught to answer any questions from social entrepreneurs on how to use online communications tools to strengthen their messages. On the panel was Steve Bridger, Rachel Beer from Beautiful World, Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving, and Nicola Jones from UnLtdWorld. The panel faced some tough questions, but when asked if they found the session useful, the resounding cheers of ‘yes!’ from the audience showed that the panel gave incisive answers using their years of experience in the field.

It’s a shame that we did miss the second day because we could have joined David Wilcox, Amy Sample Ward and Andy Gibson for the Social Collaboration Game. They were showcasing a new event format based on the content of their forthcoming book Social by Social. Luckily, David has put up a comprehensive set of notes so that we can all join in the fun.

All in all it was a fantastic event. It was a particularly special occassion for us as it was at this event in 2008 that the seed of an idea for Bright One was first planted and we haven’t looked back since.

Who knows where we’ll be next year, but one thing we can be sure of is that we’ll be first in line to attend Shine10!