1 Demystifying Social Entrepreneurship : An NLP Based Approach to Finding a Social Good Fellow Aditya Garg 1 , Kush Varshney 2 , Alexandra Olteanu 2 , Richard B Segal 2 , Dmitriy Katz- Rogozhnikov 2 , Keerthana Kumar 2 , Joana Maria 2 , Liza Mueller 3, Ben Beers 3 1- IBM Social Good Fellow, Columbia University, 2 - IBM Research. 3 - Echoing Green ABSTRACT Social entrepreneurs who start organizations to tackle social, cultural, or environmental issues, are often lost early in their journey due to lack of visibility in the space of sustainable development. Echoing Green—a funder of social enterprises—annually receives around 3000 applications from such social entrepreneurs, and on average selects just over 1% of them for a two-year Fellowship that includes both financial and leadership development support. The overall collection of applications is a rich data source for gaining insights about what makes applicants, their idea and their organization successful in achieving social impact; but also, to draw insights about topical trends and their evolution over time. To study this, we use machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Specifically, in addition to available responses to categorical questions regarding applicants e.g., educational background, their organization funding, or online presence; we also explore and extract a variety of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and personality-related features from detailed textual responses about the applicant, their idea, their solution, and their organization. We then use these features to build a classification model that is able to separate successful applications from the rest of the application pool, using a master dataset that combines six years of applications. We also identify features that are more commonly found in successful applications. 1. INTRODUCTION Social Entrepreneurship has witnessed growth throughout the world in the last years, 1 as many entrepreneurs increasingly see social good as a credible path to drive both profit and system change through innovation. These entrepreneurs are typically backed by accelerators and venture funds, who provide resources, mentorship, and guidance in the early stages of these social initiatives. One such venture is Echoing Green (www.echoinggreen.org), a social innovation fund that invests in emerging leaders and their social initiatives. Through its fellowship program, Echoing Green fosters social good by identifying leaders in the social entrepreneurship domain—providing them a seed fund, a structured leadership development program, and a community of peers. To shortlist this group of fellows, Echoing Green manually vets over 3000 applications through its long and rigorous 3-phase application evaluation process; a process that is labor intensive and highly time consuming, taking about 6 months to complete. Echoing Green believes in investing in and supporting the right people relative to the right ideas and ability to execute, rather than supporting specific business plans. Therefore, finding the right applicant is more valuable than finding the right idea. Fellowship applications contain comprehensive information about both the applicants and their initiatives. This rich textual data 1 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s (GEM) Social Entrepreneurship Report released at the end of May 2016