Hi all! My last post was intended to help some students who are focusing on digital nomads for their research. This time I'm here to help the other half of the same class — students who are working on a marketing strategy project involving a Portuguese not-for-profit/NGO that operates a cafe, a catering business, and a restaurant. 

As with my last post, this one is meant to highlight a few search tricks & strategies, as well as some key resources. There's no way I could cover all possible resources in a single post, even if I knew your specific research questions, so it's the search strategies and tips that are the most important in what follows, starting with a short discussion about how to think about your research goals: 

Overlapping concepts

I led off my earlier digital nomads post with a discussion about the stakeholders and the questions each of them might have. Thinking from the perspective of each group could be useful for this topic as well, but I'm going to demonstrate another way to approach a complex topic: intersecting concept circles!

As I see it, conducting the research needed to develop a strategy for an NGO in Portugal that runs some foodservice operations will require exploring at least the following major concepts: 

 Industry/sector: Cafes, catering services, restaurants, and consumer foodservice in general, but also be ready to learn from experiences in other sectors.

 Place: Portugal! And, of course, it's important to consider similar situations in other countries.

 Organization form: NGO, Not-for-profit, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, civil society, hybrid... and perhaps there are also lessons to be learned from the experiences of commercial businesses?

 Focus: Market & branding strategy... remembering that marketing involves far, far more than just advertising!

In a perfect world, we'd find many resources right at the spot where all the circles overlap: information that exactly meets all of our needs. It certainly doesn't hurt to look for such things, but I suspect that your sponsor will have looked as well, and found nothing so perfect. They've turned to you in hopes that you will think laterally/creatively about the topic, gather resources in which only some of the circles/concepts are covered, then combine it all with a healthy dose of your own analysis to guide them into the unknown.

For instance...

 Can you use information on the Portuguese foodservice industry and market overall?

 How about information on what other social enterprises (anywhere!) have done to market themselves?

 Or examples of NGOs (again, anywhere!) who have succeeded with similar training and/or foodservice initiatives?

 Or maybe details on how other foodservice organizations (including for-profit ones) have thought outside the box for all aspects of their marketing mix?

This is just scratching the surface. If you spend a few minutes brainstorming possible overlaps between any two or three of your topics, I'm sure you'll come up with more questions. Perhaps more importantly, you'll also be better able to spot potentially useful resources when you start searching!

Resources 

Passport 

Passport is our main "fast-moving consumer goods" market research database. It contains many reports, podcasts, and briefings that might be useful for this case. It also offers detailed demographic and economic data, with forecasts, for every country in the world. Here are a few reports that popped up in my initial searches...

• Full-Service Restaurants in Portugal
• Limited-Service Restaurants in Portugal
• Nutricafés - Cafés e Restauração SA in Hot Drinks (Portugal)
• Cafés/Bars in Portugal
• Consumer Foodservice in Portugal
• Consumer Foodservice By Location in Portugal
• New Concepts in Consumer Foodservice

Statista

A few examples of the info you'll find in Statista using searches like Portugal or Portugal foodservice:

• Eating behavior in Portugal 
• Target audience: Restaurant & food delivery users in Portugal
• Industry revenue of “event catering activities“ in Portugal from 2012 to 2025
• Number of establishments in the food service industry in Portugal from 2010 to 2022

  Articles & ebooks

Depending on which angles/concepts you are exploring, I suspect our Business Source Complete database (business journal/magazine articles) and our ProQuest Sociology Collection database (sociology resources) will be a good places to start. 

You could also just search broadly across many subject areas using the SFU Library Catalogue. For instance, here are some rough catalogue searches for recent ebooks and articles on marketing & nonprofit organizations. 

Those databases & searches will lead you to such resources as: 

• Social innovation, goal orientation, and openness: insights from social enterprise hybrids (2023 article)
  Check the references of this recent article for any leads. For instance, I notice it cites this 2015 article published in one of the top business journals: Harnessing productive tensions in hybrid organizations: The case of work integration social enterprises, which, in turn, has been cited by more than 1000 newer sources, with more than 40 of those citing articles mentioning the term "market strategy." 
   
• Systematic literature review on entrepreneurial orientation in nonprofit organizations – Far more than business‐like behavior (2023 article)
  This one is from the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing (formerly known as the "International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing"). Seems like maybe a good publication to explore further?
   
• Successfully creating and scaling a sustainable social enterprise model under uncertainty: the case of ViaVia Travellers Cafés (2018 article)
  Cited by at least 59 newer sources, many of which touch on business models and "scaling up" approaches.
   
• How can restaurant companies effectively deliver CSR efforts to consumers on social media? (2023 article)
  Compares the ability of commercial foodservice firms vs nonprofits in their ability to generate brand engagement via social media.
   
• Partners for good: how business and NGOs engage the commercial–social paradox 
  Cited by at least 140 newer sources since 2017. 
   
• Cocreating resilient hybrids: the bridging power of social enterprises' organizational logics 
  Cited by at least 9 newer sources since it was published in 2020. 
   
• Impact of service encounter elements on experiential value and customer loyalty: an empirical investigation in the coffee shop context (2021 article)
  This one cites an interesting 2019 article: A market approach to social value co-creation: Findings and implications from “Mageires” the social restaurant.

Industry research guides: Guides to doing the research necessary when starting... a catering business, a coffee shop, or a restaurant
These guides are designed to help BC-based entrepreneurs conduct secondary research to plan and launch their own businesses. The focus is on BC/Canadian resources, but (a) some of our local information may apply to other countries; and (b) once you see how the information is structured, you may be able to find similar resources elsewhere. 

See, for example, the Industry News section of the catering guide. Some of the listed news sources and associations may have useful information, such as this very detailed report on a previous Caterer of the Year from the International Caterers Association, found via this "inurl" Google search of the ICA site.

More industry news! Many such magazines and blogs are (largely) free online and often share practical advice and real examples. Here are a few examples: 

• Total Food Service - e.g.: Coffee For Good: Greenwich, CT Nonprofit Employs & Trains People With Disabilities
• Foodservice Director - e.g.: Marketing articles
• The Caterer - e.g.: Marketing articles

See our Factiva news database for more industry magazines such as Restaurant Hospitality. I used Factiva to spot news articles that mention other social enterprises that run foodservice businesses to help train at-risk people: e.g., Cafe Momentum in Dallas (details), Fair Shot Cafe in the UK (details),  and FareStart in Seattle (details). 

Miscellaneous

• A 2013 business plan for a caterer from our Business Plans Handbook collection
  Maybe useful to get a sense of typical cost drivers, etc.?
   
• Financial capacity during a pandemic crisis: insights from the non-profit sector (2021 ebook chapter)
  Focus is on the overall effect of the pandemic on Portugal's non-profit sector.
   
• Case studies from our Sage Business Cases database
  • Resto VanHarte: A Dutch Restaurant Assisting Others to Overcome Social Isolation
  • M Social Catering: Challenges of Scaling a Social Enterprise

I hope these resources and (more importantly!) the overall approach and strategies demonstrated in this post prove useful for you! It's a lot of info to absorb, but still much more efficient than beginning with random searches.

Please do email me if you want to chat about this or any other research topic.

— Mark

P.S.: A late addition: the following 2020 ebook touches on marketing of nonprofits and discusses the trend toward hybrid nonprofits. Maybe useful for a big-picture perspective on the sector? - The Routledge companion to nonprofit management

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Mark Bodnar
mbodnar@sfu.ca
Business & Economics Librarian