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Social entrepreneurs don’t get enough respect. There’s nothing wrong with running a non-profit halfway house for recovering drug addicts or providing vocational training to ex-convicts to assimilate them back into society. Its just that, among other things, these ventures are neither profitable nor exciting.

Of course, there’s no reason that this should remain true. The Economist has an article in one of its January issues describing a new, promising, fun, AND profitable business model for social entrepreneurship. Too good to be true? Read and find out.

I’m sure Virgance’s website has caught the eye of many an unemployed graduate. Now that I’ve got your attention, Virgance‘s website proudly proclaims its model as “Activism 2.0″. There are some truly amazing ideas coming from the brains of the entrepreneurial activists/activist entrepreneurs at Virgance. Aside from the the groundbreaking 1BOG and Carrotmob ideas already covered in the Economist article, Virgance is also working on a program called Lend Me Some Sugar that will allow muti-national firms to let their customers become involved in their corporate philantropy. Through Lend Me Some Sugar, customers can direct the philantropy efforts of the companies they support, letting customers and companies partner each other in doing good for society.

Virgance is only the tip of the new activism. “IfWeRanTheWorld” takes crowdsourcing (the idea of utilizing the power of crowds to achieve goals) and plunks it down in the middle of many intractable social problems we have today. It is still in the early planning stages (there isn’t even a website yet), but the idea is a remarkable one. Led by marketing veteran Cindy Gallop and software developer and serial entrepreneur Wendell Davi, IfWeRanTheWorld seeks to break down large social projects into small discrete parts that can be picked up by users to complete, and hence a great number of people can contribute to a massive project’s success, which could not have been achieved without massive effort otherwise. Both these ideas could become huge, in large part because they are profit-driven companies. The difference is that they don’t derive profits from the money going towards the project directly. Both expect a large part of revenues to come from advertising. Digital guru Esther Dyson has said that IfWeRanTheWorld could create a “liquidity of goodness”. I certainly can’t argue against that.