The founder of DiversiCom, Marie-Laure Jonet, appears as a very warm and open person, but also quite determined in her answers. She had built up a stable career in communications responsible within the European Commission before she decided to create DiversiCom in 2014. DiversiCom helps persons with disabilities to develop a professional career. Marie-Laure presents DiversiCom with passion, and she has no regret for leaving her well-paid job in the European institutions. This is mainly because DiversiCom provides lots of meaning to her professional career.
DiversiCom has a double-sided business model, where, on the one side the latent talents of the handicapped are nudged towards companies by the handicapped persons themselves. DiversiCom believes in empowering its targeted audience and helps them to find a way back into the professional workplace. On the other hand, DiversiCom facilitates the integration of handicapped personnel towards companies, convincing the companies to do this through workshops and consultancy of the benefits from a wide variety at the working place, exposing a handicap when accepted and taken into consideration by the organization, is not a loss but an enrichment. The business model of DiversiCom thus not only empowers handicapped people on their professional journey, but they also train and prepare companies with workshops and consultancy on how to best integrate them to gain all potential benefits from a diversified workgroup. DiversiCom, finds it important to have a balance in funding streams, and thus combines funding from consultancy, subsidies, and donations. DiversiCom purposefully chose to have a tri-sourced balanced set of income. 25 % should come from own-income generating activities, 57 % from subsidies and 18 % from donations. They did so because of the signal they can give to each source by showcasing multiple sources are committed and, therefore, this increases the legitimacy and lower risk perceived of the social enterprise.
The whole team of DiversiCom has adopted the philosophy from Marie-Laure when it comes down to their communications efforts, and they understand that everyone is entitled to clear and trustworthy expectations and results. In a relatively short time, Marie-Laure was able to grow her team members drastically, increasing it from 1 to 7 members. Her board in the meantime stayed stable. Convinced by its vital role, communications have been actively ingrained as part of the social enterprise’s DNA, making up an essential aspect in both operational as well as strategic elements of the SE. These communicative efforts in terms of reporting activities, measuring impact, and signaling intentions and achievements have found their way to a variety of both social and commercial partners, unlocking access to critical resources and visibility. Interestingly, her experience and importance attribution towards communications is a crucial characteristic of social entrepreneurs who are capable of scaling (i.e. amplifying) their social impact towards society (i.e. helping more people).