Build Feminist Values into your bottom line, with
The Feminist Business Model Canvas™
Taught in business schools and entrepreneurship programs around the country, my generative design tool departs from conventional canvases, introducing revolutionary concepts of value that drive innovation and change.
Retooling smart ideas from the Lean Startup movement with the power of Feminist inquiry, the FBMC makes the most important ideas and goals that drive your business clear, so you can take off in the right direction.
You’ll develop confidence and clarity in the value you provide, how you make money, and how you can push the boundaries to promote collective flourishing — without sacrificing your need for stability.
THIS TOOL HELPS YOU:
- No longer feel like you need to contort or compromise what matters to you to succeed in business.
- Open up to mind-blowing AHAs about what you do, who you serve and why.
- Articulate the values that make your business meaningful and use these values to craft distinctive products and a distinctive message.
- Identify your foundational strengths and know how to explain the full benefits of your product or service.
- Build your overall business model to be generative, not extractive, so your business contributes to a culture of care and renewal.
Feminist Business Model Canvas: Full Workbook
Read to dive all the way in?
Get the complete Feminist Business Model Canvas workbook, all 66+ pages. At your own pace and with your own priorities, use the workbook to unfold your business idea and articulate how to put your values and your vision into practice.
Start with an introduction to business modeling and a comparison of the FBMC conventional (capitalist, patriarchal) business models. Understand the uniquely feminist modeling process, developed through inquiry and co-creation. Anchor your collective purpose, then center on your values and strengths. Identify the elements of a revenue model for the customers and products you envision, and explore how all of your ideas can be woven together to create a business that makes money and promotes flourishing.
The workbook can guide you as you gather all the ingredients you need to design your own Feminist Business, for $29.
Craft the Foundation of Your Feminist Business Model Canvas
Want to get a real feel for how Feminist Business Modeling can reveal what’s special about your business and your team? Then download this twelve-page introduction to the FBMC to help your shape your own feminist business foundation. You’ll get a (free) full-sized blank Canvas and a succinct discussion of each element of the Feminist Business Model, plus just a few questions to help you unpack each element in your own business idea. This particular download gives you a chance to sketch out your current business idea and reveal a few insights about your idea — from a feminist perspective.
This introduction to the FBMC is not quite enough to develop your activist business idea in full — it’s intended to let you experience enough of the elements, questions, and process of Feminist Business Modeling that you can decide for yourself if a values-based revenue model might help you build your business. Then, you can sign up for one of my quarterly FBMC workshops, connect with an FBMC coach, and/or purchase a full copy of the FBMC Workbook.
Intro to the Feminist Business Model Canvas
Looking for an overview of Feminist Business Modeling? Download a copy of the FBMC template that shows all twelve feminist elements and their feminist definitions. With two additional pages recapping the Feminist Business Modeling process and sharing one question per element, this introduction gives you the big picture of what a feminist revenue model must include.
This top-line introduction shows you just enough that you can compare the FBMC to other business model tools and get a sense of how the FBMC is different. Note that this introduction won’t help you sketch out the top line of your business idea. For that, you need the free FBMC Foundation (offered above). And, if you’ve realized that you’re ready to dive into real, feminist, values-based business modeling, you’ll want the full FBMC Workbook or an FBMC Workshop — or both.
Become an FMBC Facilitator
Become a certified Facilitator of the FBMC so that you can use the FBMC with your consulting clients and host FBMC Workshops in your own courses and accelerators. Whether you are experienced with business modeling and canvases as tools or a newcomer, and whether you’re a longtime feminist or a coach of values-based businesses, we offer workshops and one-on-one coaching to teach you the ins and outs of the FBMC and about how to use it with students and clients.
What’s Special About the
Feminist Business Model Canvas™?
The Feminist Business Model Canvas affirms what you know is true and prioritizes what you know is important– about your own business.
In truth, the FBMC is a Trojan Horse. It looks just enough like a conventional business model canvas that conventional business people can recognize the opportunities of your business. At the same time, it weaves in specifically feminist elements so that you and your team can focus on values, meaning, contributions, and social change.
An added bonus: the FBMC is fun to use. The process asking questions and discussing possibilities helps you clarify and confirm what you’re up to, and helps you build stronger connections with your teammates, employees and stakeholders.
The Feminist Business Model Canvas diverges from conventional business models and from the popular, conventional Business Model Canvas of Osterwalder, Pigneur, et al., in three key ways:
- The FBMC offers some elements that should be part of any business idea but are routinely ignored by conventional capitalist business model canvases. Several sections (and their related questions) are unique to the FBMC: Collective Values, Foundational Strengths, Values Streams, Simple Theory of Change, and the Vision-Mission-Purpose. And, several of the subsections that give these concepts important texture, such as noting Human Costs, recognizing Social Stakeholders, highlighting functional as well as expressive needs & product features, and tracking social change outcomes, are all unique to the Feminist Business Model Canvas ™.
- The FBMC goes deep into what matters to you, your customers and your stakeholders, through the sets of questions that accompany each segment of the canvas. These specific, explicit questions guide users towards richer, more clarified business model elements and invites them to be more innovative in how they understand what they’re looking for. (Conventional business model canvases use just one or two questions because it’s assumed that everyone shares the same business-as-usual expectations of what needs to be understood about products, or customers, or costs, etc.)
- Finally, the FBMC diverges from conventional business models and canvases by bringing into focus some specific feminist values and deliberately asking how the business itself can demonstrate and respond to these values through its business model design.
So you’re not a feminist and you don’t want to build a feminist business…
and you want a values-driven business model?
That’s fine!
All activist entrepreneurs have an important choice: We can choose which values we build into our businesses. In other words, we don’t have to surrender to convention and let our businesses reinforce the values of extractive “business as usual”.
All activist entrepreneurs have an important choice: We can choose which values we build into our businesses. In other words, we don’t have to surrender to convention and let our businesses reinforce the values of extractive “business as usual”.
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The latest in game-changing thinking, management research and success cases from the vanguard of feminist business and the deep well of feminisms past.
AKA….Hot fresh ideas you can use and test now to transform the business status quo, and flourish.
And probably, the inevitable hedgehog gifs and pictures of Teddy & Falken. (Sorrynotsorry.)
