From subliminal voiceovers to in-your-face advertising there is scarcely a commercial product on the market that doesn’t have an association with some sort of celebrity. Think Roger Federer and Rolex, Nicole Kidman and Chanel and Gordon Ramsay and, well, just about everyone and everything.

Charities, too, enlist the mega-famous - George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have all been out to Africa on behalf of their chosen causes - and even the Government got in on the act earlier this year when England footballers David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand fronted its public campaign against knife crime.

In the realms of social enterprise – serious businesses that are set up to tackle a social and/or environmental need - the celebrity factor is more organic.

Fifteen is one of the highest profile examples of social enterprise, and that is largely because it was started by Jamie Oliver, already a celebrity in his own right. But as Caroline Borge of the Social Enterprise Coalition points out: “It was Jamie Oliver’s desire to use cooking as a means to inspire and train people that started him on the idea of Fifteen. So he was fundamental to the project’s conception - not a celebrity name attached to it after it was started.”

Oliver’s name cropped up in a Cabinet report on social enterprise, published in September, which found that the sector was seen as “too woolly and too nice” and needed to become more mainstream and more tangible in the public imagination.

The report suggested that one way to do this is to interest the media with high-calibre celebrities and influencers. Ranking high in a poll of those thought most able to convey a business message with a social aim were, alongside Oliver, Richard Branson, Peter Jones and Sophi Tranchell, managing director of Divine Chocolate.

Peter Jones, who is best known for his role on TV’s Dragon’s Den, has aligned himself with social enterprise and young people by giving £100,000 to Make Your Mark, which runs a social enterprise contest for young people, and Tim Campbell, the first winner of The Apprentice, has become a “social enterprise ambassador”.

A handful of social entrepreneurs, such as Penny Newman – who headed up Cafedirect and now runs the Fifteen Foundation - and Kresse Wesling who, among other things, runs EaKo, a social enterprise that makes products from salvaged fire hoses, have had an increased profile because they are good at what they do and that has helped the SE movement and also their businesses.

Then there are those on the international stage, such as eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll, who funds the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, which has attracted interest from big names such as Robert Redford, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore and Ben Kingsley. Although none of Skoll’s portfolio of SEs works directly with celebrity spokespeople, preferring to let the “Uncommon Heroes” tell their stories.

So what would a helping hand from a TV entrepreneur or Hollywood star actually achieve for an SE? “It gives them profile and gets people asking questions about the role of social enterprises,” says Tim West, editor of Social Enterprise Magazine.

These are questions that clearly need answers according to West: “Right now the idea of social enterprise is confusing and relatively unknown. A Government-backed survey earlier this year revealed that even among those groups of people who would be most supportive of social enterprise as an idea, very few of them even knew it existed. If your most important potential supporters don’t actually know you exist, that’s a major flaw in your business plan.”

According to West, once people meet a social entrepreneur or experience what a social enterprise can do they are often hooked. Celebrities just help that process along.

A case in point is Rafi.ki, an online learning community that uses simple technology to build successful partnerships between schools and their pupils in more than 100 countries around the world.

Its educational projects, such as Perspectives on Africa, include videos of interviews with celebrities such as Nigerian footballer Jay Jay Okocha and the Muslim rapper Riz Ahmed.

“The moment you have a celebrity you raise the children’s engagement from 10 per cent to 110 per cent,” says John MacNutt, director of Rafi.ki.

“In our projects, celebrities help to remove the barrier between children remaining local citizens and help them to become global citizens. In a sense the celebrities make the message of a project bite,” adds MacNutt.

“The sort of celebrities that work best,” says West, “tend to be those who have both the desire to be philanthropic, and, because it’s a social enterprise and not just a charity, are able to channel their business know-how and influence into the project, not just their face or cash.

The likes of Ben Elton and Freema Agyeman have supported publicity for Divine Chocolate because they like the idea of a real business with a cause. Agyeman, a British actress of Ghanaian and Iranian descent, is encouraged by the fact that Divine ploughs 45 per cent of its profits back into Ghanaian cocoa farming. “It’s a bit harder to attract celebrities for no fee but they have been incredibly important in our ten years of business,” says Charlotte Borger, head of communications at Divine.

In conclusion, Caroline Borge sounds a note of caution: “Of course Kresse Wesling, for example, is not against, say, Jennifer Aniston wearing one of her belts if it raised the profile of the good work being done. But I don’t think social enterprises would want a celebrity as their ‘face’ unless that celebrity was integral to the enterprise, otherwise I think it would go against the spirit of what is central to a social enterprise – their focus on their social and/or environmental mission.”