Share Your Secret Sauce

(Illustration by iStock/Ponomariova_Maria)

We love to talk about scaling solutions in the social sector. It feels good to imagine a day when every person who needs support can get it. The reality is, though, that scale is elusive for most of us. Yes, we successfully develop and implement effective solutions to pressing problems, but we can’t do it for everyone everywhere because it isn’t feasible, it’s too expensive, or both. And that is incredibly frustrating.

Many thoughtful authors have offered perspectives here at SSIR and elsewhere on how to think about scale—Jeff Bradach of Bridgespan, Kevin Starr of Mulago Foundation, and Irina Snissar Lobo and Maria Zapata of Ashoka, to name a few. Those of us who lead nonprofit organizations and aspire to scale often turn to this literature so we can design our efforts in smart ways. We identify the core problem we’re solving and our unique solution, we codify what must be replicated to achieve our outcomes, we increase the number of people or communities we’re reaching, we evaluate results, we identify a financial model that works, etc. All of that is critical. And, while we can grow this way, and even get really big by nonprofit standards, there’s often still no clear path to actually getting to scale.

What Is Scale Exactly?

At my organization, Playworks, we define scale with the phrase “every kid,” and by this we mean—when every kid has access to safe and healthy play every day at school, Playworks’ approach will have reached scale. There are 32 million elementary school-age children in the United States. We’ve been growing for more than 25 years and currently count approximately 700,000 children in 1,400 schools in our circle of direct influence. That’s 2% of the kids, making the idea of scale pretty daunting. Clearly, we won’t get there by only doing what we’ve been doing.

Despite the tough math, all hope is not lost. Over the past several years, we have created our own path to scale by catalyzing other organizations through partnership. We succeeded even through the disruptions of the pandemic, and we have a sense of what further success could look like in the future.

It all started in 2015 with a conversation about how to define success. After years of celebrating the number of kids and schools we reached, we forced ourselves to consider what it would take to shift our mindset from focusing on how many kids were receiving Playworks programs to how many kids had access to safe and healthy play, whether through Playworks or not. As a nudge in that direction, Jennifer Hoos Rothberg at Einhorn Collaborative introduced our team to the Billions Institute. While the folks at Billions had not worked directly in education, their scaling strategies were exactly what we needed at that moment. The most intriguing—and the one we’re only successfully implementing now—is the idea of unleashing others.

Billions defines unleashing this way: “Unleashing is all about orchestrating the loss of control of thousands of people you’ll probably never meet moving in generally the desired direction.”

As Kevin Starr, CEO of Mulago Foundation, describes it, “In the vast majority of cases, going to scale means that a solution has to escape the orbit of the originating organization.”

Those are thought-provoking descriptions. But the phrase “loss of control” terrified us, not only because control is synonymous with success in so many facets of organizational leadership. It was hard to imagine letting go, mostly because we are deeply invested in making sure play is safe and healthy and inclusive for every child.

It may appear that we’re control freaks on the playground. Nonprofit organizations are rewarded for fidelity to a model (which requires control) and documented outcomes (which also require control). We’re more successful in fundraising when our singular brand is recognized and differentiated from others (which requires control, too).

The idea of unleashing rattled around in the background while we built other pieces of our growth strategy. Playworks founder Jill Vialet and I would muse about, “What would happen if we gave away everything we know how to do at Playworks to other people so they could make more safe and healthy play happen?”

Ultimately, we decided to stop wondering and start trying. We decided to pursue scale by offering community-based organizations that are focused on children and/or youth development the opportunity to become certified in Playworks’ approach. These partner organizations would activate safe and healthy play during the school day at recess by relying on sustainable earned income and long-term support in the background from Playworks. Now, after a multi-year, pandemic-impacted journey, we have successfully piloted a certification model with the Boys & Girls Club of Carson (BGCC), in California, expanding the partnership from one to 16 schools, and we are launching with three other national nonprofit partners in other states. These partners represent the opportunity to support play at thousands more schools reaching millions more children. Admittedly, true scale is still off in the distance, but we now know that by unleashing others, we can accelerate our progress.

Nine Recommendations for Starting on the Path to Scale

1. Get comfortable with sharing the “secret sauce.” We had to engage our board and staff in separate conversations about why we would share our “proprietary” knowledge and give up control. Some Playworkers understandably pushed back at first, worrying that other organizations might not implement our program with fidelity or could become a competitor. It came down to mission. We cannot hold tight to our secret sauce and win the long game. Nonprofits must expand our work to become partners who support others to leverage our proven approaches, practices, and tools.

2. Clarify internally the elements that are essential to achieving the desired outcomes, as opposed to those that are “good to have.” We love everything that is part of Playworks’ approach to safe and healthy play, but to unleash others to implement it, we had to narrow it down to the critical pieces. Our staff struggled to let go of aspects of our program model that make it extra great. They needed time and proof points, along with consistent reassurance, that we are building strategies to maintain fidelity to the core for the long term. Since then, our pilot partners have proven that fidelity can be achieved and expected from those outside Playworks, making it truly possible to move beyond “the orbit of the originating organization.”

3. Start small with partners who have their own mission-driven reason to try it on and learn. We asked ourselves, “Who else in the ecosystem of children and youth-serving organizations might be interested in play as a solution for children's physical and emotional well-being?” Organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs (BGC) share similar values and could be collaborative partners to do the work with our support. Even so, Playworkers worried we were giving away everything that makes our organization succeed and that BGC’s national brand would overshadow us. In the beginning, some BGC folks didn’t see the benefit of piloting something so narrowly focused on play during the school day. Admittedly, supporting recess could be perceived as outside their nationally-established strategic priorities, so proving the connection with a local experiment was critical. By starting with a pilot—one partnership—to test and learn, nonprofits can create a proof point of shared vision and success.

4. Create value for all the actors. Playworks approaches partners with curiosity about their needs and priorities. Our success with this strategy depends also on the understanding that collaborators don’t have to agree to solve precisely the same problem. We can identify strategic priorities for each partner that will be met by working together and dedicating ourselves to ensuring they all are met. The big win is for the shared target beneficiary (in our case, kids), who get more and better support over the long term.

According to our pilot partner BGC of Carson, a certification partnership with Playworks came with six clear benefits:

• An opportunity to serve children during the school day, thereby more comprehensively meeting more needs in the community.
• Embedded interactions with children during the school day who may, as a result, want to spend after-school hours in BGCC’s after school program with their “recess coach.”
• Association with Playworks’ brand helps them build relationships with school districts.
• Model that has built-in, long-term financial sustainability from school and district contracts for services.
• Spillover effects from Playworks training into staff effectiveness in out-of-school-time programming.
• Creative approach to staffing that creates full-time roles for youth development workers who support recess during the school day and then shift over to after-school programs.

5. Invest in building trust. This takes time and lots of conversations, including exploring what could potentially make a partnership painful or frustrating. We knew we and BGCC shared a commitment to ensuring every kid feels cared for and knows they belong. At the same time, we are operationally quite different. Playworks operates primarily during the school day at elementary schools, while Boys & Girls Clubs support children from elementary through high school and largely in out-of-school time. That difference created the core opportunity. Playworks could embed its approach within after school programs and support more kids getting to play in schools, and the Boys & Girls Clubs could expand its impact by implementing Playworks in schools while also building a culture of belonging—thereby meeting a critical need of their local schools.

6. Define success for each partner for the long term. Success is often in the eye of the beholder, and that beholder may be a youth development worker or a school principal or a CEO. Playworks’ vision of long-term success is that every kid has access to safe and healthy play every day, regardless of who is actively supporting that play at school. We want to build long-term partnerships with other community-based organizations to maintain fidelity to our core practices and create a sustainable model. BGCC is dedicated to supporting kids throughout the school day in the local communities where they operate and inspiring many of those kids to participate in their out-of-school time programs.

As champions of our partnership, BGCC CEO Kim Richards and I had to leverage considerable internal social capital to inspire enough colleagues to move forward toward our overlapping, but not identical, definitions of success. We also had to clarify how we would assess the pilot and commit to sharing the good and the bad with our networks and stakeholders. Our best argument was that more kids would get the support they deserve. Coming back to our missions time and again was critical to building enough support to go forward.

7. Convert potential competition to increased impact with a funding model that supports all partners. Kevin Starr’s model includes “payers at scale” who have incentives and resources to fund the solution for the long term. By exploring the financial model questions with BGCC, with full transparency to our costs, prices, and scopes of work, we collaboratively identified a long-term solution in school and district funding to cover the incremental costs of staff for the club. For other nonprofits, those funding streams may be local or state government or third-party payers that want the change to be achieved.

From the beginning, Playworks made it clear to the BGCC team that we would support them charging a fee to schools for this Playworks-certified service. We expected their costs would be less than ours, so they could require a lower price. Essentially, we created a competitor, taking the idea of “doer” even further. This was a bold move, and it was necessary because Playworks acknowledges we will never reach every kid on our own. What’s important to us is creating a world where every community has a set of youth-serving organizations collectively providing safe and healthy play in all elementary schools.

8. Embrace and measure implementation struggles to refine the model. We committed to a shared value of using data to improve outcomes. Evaluation took many forms, including informal check-ins with BGCC leadership and staff and using Playworks’ validated measurement tools to confirm where implementation was working and where it wasn’t. Analysis of the data collected revealed: (1) programmatic progress and outcomes, (2) expansion considerations, and (3) mutual organizational benefits. The results became the blueprint for improving and refining the model, ultimately inspiring Playworks to invest more in building a support system for partners.

9. Build what works at scale. The pilot must be replicable in a wide spectrum of conditions, geographies, and relationships. In Playworks’ case, we have developed a one-year certification process where Playworks trains the staff of partner organizations on the strategies, practices, and outcome expectations, with the goal of the program being maintained with minimal ongoing support from Playworks. New collaborative partners will complete a certification while implementing our model based on standards of practice. The Playworks team will be available for coaching and problem-solving. As new partners gain experience and understand the model, our team will step back and let them take over. That will free Playworks up to prepare new partners to implement the model in new communities. Our next step is to test the hypothesis that the model can work anywhere, with any partner in the youth-serving ecosystem. That test is underway.

The Role of Philanthropy

Stepping onto the path to scale is a risk. It requires resources, vision, and the courage to try and fail. Funders can support organizations that are ready, both with financial support and with technical assistance (as Einhorn Collaborative did for Playworks). Philanthropy can also connect nonprofit leaders with each other and join in the exploration of what “unleashing” could look like for their grantees. We see examples of funders who are willing to support this kind of risk-taking, before a scaling strategy has been proven. We need philanthropy to demonstrate belief in the potential for unleashing approaches to produce dramatically more impact. That will enable and encourage organizations to go beyond themselves to truly collaborate with others. MacKenzie Scott’s unrestricted approach to philanthropy is one way to get there, and for her support of Playworks we are grateful. Philanthropic partnerships are critical for any of us to get on the path.

Final Reflections

The results we have achieved to date were only possible because all the parties involved were fully committed to experimenting and learning together. That commitment was rooted in shared values and a willingness to take on the strategic priorities of the other partners. It required a lengthy process of answering tough questions to define how we would work together and persist through to our goal:

• What can we accomplish together that we can’t do individually?
• How can we stop competing and start collaborating?
• How can we create a pilot to test and learn with honesty?
• Where can we take the collaboration from here—adhering to our commitment to each other while not getting in each other’s way?

Critical actors in social innovation can restructure our work to foster collaborations that will be genuinely transformative. Funders can innovate on how to structure grants and evaluate proposals involving partners meeting complementary missions. Nonprofit leaders can learn to develop partnerships where each contributes to common goals that achieve their individual missions. Grant evaluators can bring insights and smart questions to evaluating scaling collaborations.

Playworks’ unleashing strategy is a cornerstone of a credible path to scale. We have a plan for the next phase of our scaling journey that includes benchmarks to engage at least 100 community-based organizational partners by 2028, to build an online community for staff of these organizations and to conduct evaluation on the results, similarities, and differences across the variety of partners that join in this initiative.

We anticipate partners will have a lot to share about what works best in their organizations and communities. We know we’re going to learn a great deal from this next round of implementation, and we’re looking forward to the continuous improvement that will result.

In the nonprofit sector, we can’t help but be laser-focused on the day-to-day outputs and programmatic efforts that we directly control. Turning attention and resources toward giving away our secret sauce to others, who we don’t control, may seem counterintuitive. I believe unleashing is the strategy that will ensure we get to the endgame we seek—together.

Read more stories by Elizabeth Cushing.