The Social Impact Exchange is holding a http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=835839 [conference] around this very topic: Scaling social programs. At the conference, the winner of its business plan competition will be announced. I served a consultant coaching one entrant on ways to improve their plan in that competition. I am very excited about the many innovative solutions to both social problems and scaling that the competition evoked.
This article was very helpful. We are in the midst of an effort to scale our services and replicate nationally and have found very few resources to inform our planning. Each organizational model for expansion is necessarily different, depending on their model for providing services, and I find very little in the area of legal services - particularly in the area of managing pro bono partnerships.
In our case, the Tahirih Justice Center, for the past 14 years, has developed and refined a model for providing free holistic legal services on behalf of women and girls fleeing human rights abuses, which is highly effective (with a 99% success rate) and efficient (turning every dollar donated to us into five by leveraging pro bono attorney resources). With the management infrastructure in place to handle an exponential number of pro bono attorneys working on our behalf, we are in the process of expanding throughout the US and have now opened 2 additional offices (now in VA, MD, and TX).
the Harvard Business Review City Year case study was very useful, but incomplete. We have found few relevant resources to rely on to help in our national expansion process, our board and senior staff conducted interviews with 10 organizations that had expanded nationally to learn from their experiences. We interviewed organizations like Girl Scouts, ACS, Catholic Charities, and Chick-a-filet to learn about their thoughts on centralization v. decentralization, how to maintain continuity of quality and culture, etc.
I suspect that there are resources we are missing and would love to learn what else is out there that might help inform the growth of organizations wishing to replicate.
Scaling is hard - especially when you’re on such a tight budget. I actually just wrote an article about Brand Scaling—http://bit.ly/atDVfI—in which I cover three low cost / high volume channels to do this on.
It’s really all about making the most out of your resources, and with the internet, there are definitely a lot more resources out there to leverage. Of course, my article’s specifically on building the brand of a small-business, but when it comes to the non-profit sector, a lot of the challenges can be seen as similar.
Most people thinking about scaling are thinking about franchising. But you cannot cut and paste something that works somewhere into many other places, because it is a very limiting process. Who wants a world of MacDonalds and Startbucks?
Rather you need to use the knowledge accumulated to empower other people in other places to do similar things but with their own local flavor.
Entrepreneur Commons is designed with this basic principle in mind to promote a culture a collaboration and entrepreneurship, and I hope that this is how social entrepreneurs in general will consider scaling: invite others to experiment with a process that works, and let them adapt what works to their own local context. Then share best practices, as a feedback loop into the system.
The risk otherwise is to impose a brand and IP that will limit creativity and ultimately limit the potential of what can be done locally to resolve the issues at hand.
Social scaling is such a difficult ‘knot’ to undo. Replication contributes but the factors ‘in play’ in the different places need a high level of recognition within the scaling approach. Copying simply just can’t work. Different cultures, different conditions, different stakeholders all need to be brought into the process of scaling to extract the best from a model that seems to be an answer and on this platform add the critical local conditioners and aspects to make it work in that environment.
Cracking the code to scaling is critical to extract the value from promising ventures and adapt them for the conditions being faced elsewhere. We need more discussion around this altogether
Fantastic article. I wholeheartedly agree that there needs to be more research into and resource on the topic of scale for nonprofits, starting with definition. We’ve tried to collect some on our site, including Jeff and Bridgespan’s early work: http://www.vppartners.org/learning/resources/scale.html
One of our greatest lessons echoes Jeff’s point: “Finding ways to scale an organization’s impact without scaling its size is the new frontier in the field of social innovation”. From the experiences of our first portfolio, we’ve expanded our definition of scale to focus more on broader impact. As our President and CEO, Carol Thompson Cole wrote in Growing What Works (Part 1):
While we still believe reaching more children and youth in our community with proven and effective programs is critical, we have also learned that scale, for us, can be achieved in other ways as well. Increasing outcomes—deepening, expanding, and/or improving programs—is an important part of scaling impact in our community. We have also found that some programs have great potential to disrupt a system, provide a new model for program delivery, and could be replicated by others, that while they themselves may not grow much more in numbers, scale could be achieved indirectly. A VPP investment usually has some combination of these approaches to scale.
Jeff, this is very well done and places the subject of “scaling what works” into a more constructive context and with a clearer perspective. I have long been a critic of the view of “replication,” not because I do not believe organizations should expand to other areas of the world, but rather of the rather narrow view of how too many embarked on such expansion. Your article appropriately points out the inherent complexity and how those who have done it have recognized this. In other words, rather than “parachuting into a community to fit the community to one’s nonprofit’s model ,” leaders are gradually adjusting to “developing a base of support within the intended community, taking the time to understand the community’s assets and needs, and then fitting that nonprofit’s offerings to best meet those needs.”
As I did with too many areas, although I always believed scaling was about impact, I did a poor job of communicating that my early years in Venture Philanthropy Partners. Since those formative years, my view of scaling has more clearly evolved along the lines of what you outlined with, perhaps, a slight twist. I believe organizations should, by definition, scale to impact (and that could mean being better and/or growing in scope), and even more importantly, they should scale to mission. In other words, the leadership should scale their organization in the way that best allows them to realize their intended purpose, fulfill their mission.
Hey Jeff, Thank you so much for your thoughtful article, which has so many important takeaways. At Ayllu we work specifically on scaling the impact of social enterprises in developing countries. Ayllu maps business solutions to poverty worldwide and shares information that accelerates their growth. We maintain the largest map of social enterprises in developing countries, which we use to identify and spread best practices and scaling models such as microfranchising. Our goal is to facilitate scale by driving better decision-making, saving our sector millions of dollars every year. This month, Next Billion will begin hosting our public map, a searchable list of social enterprises accompanied by weekly blogging. We would love to get your thoughts on our approach to scaling impact.
Regarding the article’s discussion of size vs. impact, I wonder how this affects social enterprises who must reach economies of sale through high volume, low margin sales? How can we help them scale their impact, maintain a reasonable size, but also recover their costs? Also, how does competition affect the social entrepreneurs you’ve seen who run social enterprises and have a profit motive? Lastly, I was wondering what your thoughts are on franchising, given that you mention it in the beginning but don’t discuss it too much later on. What do you think about Marc Dangeard’s comment?
Thanks for holding the line on the scaling issue Jeff! I think it’s essential that when we are talking about scaling we don’t think just in geographic terms (i.e grow an existing service from one suburb or city to another) but that we also consider services that can go to scale from the getgo (eg web-based services). At the risk of being self-serving, this is what we are looking to do with reachout.com - through harnessing the power of the Internet and social media within a few years we can connect with millions of young Americans and elicit hope especially in those who might be wondering if life is worth living. According to the 2007 CDC YRBS study, walk into your average American High School classroom and the chances are that two of the teens before you will attempt suicide in the coming year. That’s an obscene statistic, one we must change, and one we can. Traditional mental health services however connect with only a few in need and even less with minority populations. On top of this, mental health budgets are under increasing pressure - Gov Schwarznegger has proposed a 60% reduction in funding for California. With the advent of handheld devices now commonplace in some of the most underserved communities we can reach out to young people in ways that traditional services never could. We can increase rates of help-seeking early on so that we don’t bear increased costs many years down the track. In short, we now have unprecedented opportunities through technology to deliver prevention/early intervention models for relatively few dollars. For what it’s worth, we were surprised recently to learn that a leading innovative grant maker viewed service delivery as being about face-to-face interactions only and that scaling was limited to geographic extension of services. Given the pervasive access to technology by young people, policy makers and grant providers now need to think about the Internet/social media as a setting just as valid as the school or local community settings. Finally I should declare that our entry to the US was based on a feasibility study by the Bridgespan Group. Tks Jack
Thanks for drawing attention to the diversity of approaches when it comes to scaling high-performing nonprofits. The comments from this article are a great testament to the buzz and excitement around this issue. While I’d argue that we shouldn’t simply throw away replication as a technique for increasing impact, we absolutely have to expand our thinking and gain clarity about what’s working and how to effectively go to scale. Over the next three years, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) will be working to tackle these issues.
Through a new initiative, Scaling What Works, GEO will work to ensure funders and nonprofits have the tools, resources and skills needed to bring effective community programs to scale. GEO will support selected and potential intermediaries of the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) and also serve as an information broker, convener and liaison between the SIF and philanthropy. For GEO though, this effort is about much more than the Social Innovation Fund. We will be sharing what we’re learning about scaling, nonprofit financial sustainability, building an evidence based and other related topics with all grantmakers big and small, urban and rural and government and private to make sure thousands of nonprofits have the resources they need to effectively tackle our most pressing social problems. To learn more about GEO and Scaling What Works, please go to http://www.geofunders.org.
I would like to suggest an additional channel for scaling social innovation that echoes the work that Tony Bowen wrote about: that laying the groundwork in communities, or building both a culture and an infrastructure of sorts for innovation and change might help grow the impact of both national and local efforts.
We explore these issues in more detail in our new book, which Jeff generously reviewed and made much better, The Power of Social Innovation (http://www.powerofsocialinnovation.com).
The WH Social Innovation Fund, Race to the Top, Louisiana’s Office of Social Entrepreneurship, and New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) innovation fund are public sector entities supporting the growth of social innovation. There are also a number of nonprofit and philanthropic efforts that look to incubate and grow local innovations or to import/replicate outside innovations in their city: Boston’s Greenlight Fund, Indianapolis’ Mind Trust, Virginia’s Phoenix Project, Portland’s Springboard Innovation, Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, Durham’s Bull City Forward, and others, many of which have been highlighted in this journal.
What might be missing in these efforts is a recognition that trying new ideas and then growing what works is not just a matter of testing and measuring and replicating. There are political costs and risks involved for public and private funders: risk of failure and subsequent damage to one’s reputation, a public official’s fear of getting his/her name in the newspaper for the wrong reason, opposition from incumbent providers and other interest groups invested in the status quo, short political cycles, close social networks between local foundation, business, and nonprofit leadership, etc.
Strong executive leadership from the President or a mayor can help create a culture of innovation, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg for example.
But I think we need to better understand how mobilization and building political will around innovation and change can also loosen the soil for growing social innovation. Social media is probably part of the answer, but the solution is also likely to include more mechanisms for securing feedback from clients, making information on the performance of our existing problem solving efforts more public, and using our innovation infrastructure to support advocacy and mobilizing groups as we support service providers. Also the Knight Foundation, which supported our research, is funding some very interesting work around new vehicles for community engagement and its connection to social innovation.
“Finding ways to scale an organization’s impact without scaling its size is the new frontier in the field of social innovation” - this may be true for the field of social innovation (and thank godness the penny has finally dropped) but it isn’t true for the field of social change and develpment as a whole, which has been working on this “frontier” for the last twenty years or so, generating a rich literature in the process. For a good early summary readers might want to check out “Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World” that David Hulme and I edited way back in 1992 for Earthscan. Drawing from an international conference on “Scaling up NGO Impact in Development” held in 1991 and a large number of case studies from across the world, “Making a Difference” illustrates the many different paths to scaling-up that existed even then, and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses in way that seems to have gone missing in much of the literature on social innovation. Of course some of the cases now seem dated, but that analytic framework is just as useful today, especially in drawing attention to the trade-offs that exist between different strategies, and echoing some of the points in Jeff’s article above. It’s always good to recognize what we can learn from the past so that we don’t keep re-inventing the wheel.
As a former organizer, Obama knows that there are some ineffective nonprofits out there, which, of course, we appreciate. I love the emphasis on scaling, but can we address some of the things which prevent scaling?
Here are some tips:
Encourage making mistakes! Many nonprofits forget this is how you create innovation.
Invest in people not just with training, but actually make salaries attached to how long they have been there, and assessments of their job performance. Hire from within, and hire women, and people of color as leaders.
Get better board members, and make it worth their while to keep an eagle eye on the organization’s leadership. Make them angel investors of the organization.
Stop siloing, and encourage cross-cultural, cross-generational communication as a fundamental building block of your nonprofit. Weekly meetings. A staff newsletter. And most important: Training on Rankism.
COMMENTS
BY Geri Stengel
ON May 26, 2010 05:00 PM
The Social Impact Exchange is holding a http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=835839 [conference] around this very topic: Scaling social programs. At the conference, the winner of its business plan competition will be announced. I served a consultant coaching one entrant on ways to improve their plan in that competition. I am very excited about the many innovative solutions to both social problems and scaling that the competition evoked.
Innovation is, of course, not enough. These social entrepreneurs also need funding, another area in which http://ventureneer.com/vblog/impact-investors-new-source-funding-social-entrepreneurs [innovation] is needed.
BY Layli Miller-Muro
ON May 28, 2010 11:52 AM
This article was very helpful. We are in the midst of an effort to scale our services and replicate nationally and have found very few resources to inform our planning. Each organizational model for expansion is necessarily different, depending on their model for providing services, and I find very little in the area of legal services - particularly in the area of managing pro bono partnerships.
In our case, the Tahirih Justice Center, for the past 14 years, has developed and refined a model for providing free holistic legal services on behalf of women and girls fleeing human rights abuses, which is highly effective (with a 99% success rate) and efficient (turning every dollar donated to us into five by leveraging pro bono attorney resources). With the management infrastructure in place to handle an exponential number of pro bono attorneys working on our behalf, we are in the process of expanding throughout the US and have now opened 2 additional offices (now in VA, MD, and TX).
the Harvard Business Review City Year case study was very useful, but incomplete. We have found few relevant resources to rely on to help in our national expansion process, our board and senior staff conducted interviews with 10 organizations that had expanded nationally to learn from their experiences. We interviewed organizations like Girl Scouts, ACS, Catholic Charities, and Chick-a-filet to learn about their thoughts on centralization v. decentralization, how to maintain continuity of quality and culture, etc.
I suspect that there are resources we are missing and would love to learn what else is out there that might help inform the growth of organizations wishing to replicate.
BY Samir
ON June 10, 2010 07:17 PM
Scaling is hard - especially when you’re on such a tight budget. I actually just wrote an article about Brand Scaling—http://bit.ly/atDVfI—in which I cover three low cost / high volume channels to do this on.
It’s really all about making the most out of your resources, and with the internet, there are definitely a lot more resources out there to leverage. Of course, my article’s specifically on building the brand of a small-business, but when it comes to the non-profit sector, a lot of the challenges can be seen as similar.
BY Marc Dangeard
ON June 10, 2010 11:14 PM
Most people thinking about scaling are thinking about franchising. But you cannot cut and paste something that works somewhere into many other places, because it is a very limiting process. Who wants a world of MacDonalds and Startbucks?
Rather you need to use the knowledge accumulated to empower other people in other places to do similar things but with their own local flavor.
Entrepreneur Commons is designed with this basic principle in mind to promote a culture a collaboration and entrepreneurship, and I hope that this is how social entrepreneurs in general will consider scaling: invite others to experiment with a process that works, and let them adapt what works to their own local context. Then share best practices, as a feedback loop into the system.
The risk otherwise is to impose a brand and IP that will limit creativity and ultimately limit the potential of what can be done locally to resolve the issues at hand.
BY Paul Hobcraft
ON June 11, 2010 12:59 AM
Social scaling is such a difficult ‘knot’ to undo. Replication contributes but the factors ‘in play’ in the different places need a high level of recognition within the scaling approach. Copying simply just can’t work. Different cultures, different conditions, different stakeholders all need to be brought into the process of scaling to extract the best from a model that seems to be an answer and on this platform add the critical local conditioners and aspects to make it work in that environment.
Cracking the code to scaling is critical to extract the value from promising ventures and adapt them for the conditions being faced elsewhere. We need more discussion around this altogether
BY Victoria Vrana
ON June 11, 2010 09:55 AM
Fantastic article. I wholeheartedly agree that there needs to be more research into and resource on the topic of scale for nonprofits, starting with definition. We’ve tried to collect some on our site, including Jeff and Bridgespan’s early work: http://www.vppartners.org/learning/resources/scale.html
We’ve also written about some of the lessons Venture Philanthropy Partners has learned helping organizations scale:
Growing What Works, Part I: May 2009
http://www.vppartners.org/learning/perspectives/pres_perspective/0905-growing-what-works-pt1.html
and
Growing What Works, Part II: Dec 2009
http://www.vppartners.org/learning/perspectives/pres_perspective/0912-growing-what-works-pt2.html
Also, our report: Greater than the Sum of Its Parts, Lessons on Regional Scale
http://www.vppartners.org/learning/reports/demographics/VPP-Greater-than-the-Sum-part2.pdf
One of our greatest lessons echoes Jeff’s point: “Finding ways to scale an organization’s impact without scaling its size is the new frontier in the field of social innovation”. From the experiences of our first portfolio, we’ve expanded our definition of scale to focus more on broader impact. As our President and CEO, Carol Thompson Cole wrote in Growing What Works (Part 1):
While we still believe reaching more children and youth in our community with proven and effective programs is critical, we have also learned that scale, for us, can be achieved in other ways as well. Increasing outcomes—deepening, expanding, and/or improving programs—is an important part of scaling impact in our community. We have also found that some programs have great potential to disrupt a system, provide a new model for program delivery, and could be replicated by others, that while they themselves may not grow much more in numbers, scale could be achieved indirectly. A VPP investment usually has some combination of these approaches to scale.
BY Mario Morino
ON June 11, 2010 10:13 AM
Jeff, this is very well done and places the subject of “scaling what works” into a more constructive context and with a clearer perspective. I have long been a critic of the view of “replication,” not because I do not believe organizations should expand to other areas of the world, but rather of the rather narrow view of how too many embarked on such expansion. Your article appropriately points out the inherent complexity and how those who have done it have recognized this. In other words, rather than “parachuting into a community to fit the community to one’s nonprofit’s model ,” leaders are gradually adjusting to “developing a base of support within the intended community, taking the time to understand the community’s assets and needs, and then fitting that nonprofit’s offerings to best meet those needs.”
As I did with too many areas, although I always believed scaling was about impact, I did a poor job of communicating that my early years in Venture Philanthropy Partners. Since those formative years, my view of scaling has more clearly evolved along the lines of what you outlined with, perhaps, a slight twist. I believe organizations should, by definition, scale to impact (and that could mean being better and/or growing in scope), and even more importantly, they should scale to mission. In other words, the leadership should scale their organization in the way that best allows them to realize their intended purpose, fulfill their mission.
BY Melissa Richer
ON June 14, 2010 06:35 AM
Hey Jeff, Thank you so much for your thoughtful article, which has so many important takeaways. At Ayllu we work specifically on scaling the impact of social enterprises in developing countries. Ayllu maps business solutions to poverty worldwide and shares information that accelerates their growth. We maintain the largest map of social enterprises in developing countries, which we use to identify and spread best practices and scaling models such as microfranchising. Our goal is to facilitate scale by driving better decision-making, saving our sector millions of dollars every year. This month, Next Billion will begin hosting our public map, a searchable list of social enterprises accompanied by weekly blogging. We would love to get your thoughts on our approach to scaling impact.
Regarding the article’s discussion of size vs. impact, I wonder how this affects social enterprises who must reach economies of sale through high volume, low margin sales? How can we help them scale their impact, maintain a reasonable size, but also recover their costs? Also, how does competition affect the social entrepreneurs you’ve seen who run social enterprises and have a profit motive? Lastly, I was wondering what your thoughts are on franchising, given that you mention it in the beginning but don’t discuss it too much later on. What do you think about Marc Dangeard’s comment?
Thanks!
Melissa
http://www.aylluinitiative.org
BY Jack Heath
ON June 15, 2010 04:48 PM
Thanks for holding the line on the scaling issue Jeff! I think it’s essential that when we are talking about scaling we don’t think just in geographic terms (i.e grow an existing service from one suburb or city to another) but that we also consider services that can go to scale from the getgo (eg web-based services). At the risk of being self-serving, this is what we are looking to do with reachout.com - through harnessing the power of the Internet and social media within a few years we can connect with millions of young Americans and elicit hope especially in those who might be wondering if life is worth living. According to the 2007 CDC YRBS study, walk into your average American High School classroom and the chances are that two of the teens before you will attempt suicide in the coming year. That’s an obscene statistic, one we must change, and one we can. Traditional mental health services however connect with only a few in need and even less with minority populations. On top of this, mental health budgets are under increasing pressure - Gov Schwarznegger has proposed a 60% reduction in funding for California. With the advent of handheld devices now commonplace in some of the most underserved communities we can reach out to young people in ways that traditional services never could. We can increase rates of help-seeking early on so that we don’t bear increased costs many years down the track. In short, we now have unprecedented opportunities through technology to deliver prevention/early intervention models for relatively few dollars. For what it’s worth, we were surprised recently to learn that a leading innovative grant maker viewed service delivery as being about face-to-face interactions only and that scaling was limited to geographic extension of services. Given the pervasive access to technology by young people, policy makers and grant providers now need to think about the Internet/social media as a setting just as valid as the school or local community settings. Finally I should declare that our entry to the US was based on a feasibility study by the Bridgespan Group. Tks Jack
BY Tony Bowen
ON June 16, 2010 11:12 AM
Thanks for drawing attention to the diversity of approaches when it comes to scaling high-performing nonprofits. The comments from this article are a great testament to the buzz and excitement around this issue. While I’d argue that we shouldn’t simply throw away replication as a technique for increasing impact, we absolutely have to expand our thinking and gain clarity about what’s working and how to effectively go to scale. Over the next three years, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) will be working to tackle these issues.
Through a new initiative, Scaling What Works, GEO will work to ensure funders and nonprofits have the tools, resources and skills needed to bring effective community programs to scale. GEO will support selected and potential intermediaries of the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) and also serve as an information broker, convener and liaison between the SIF and philanthropy. For GEO though, this effort is about much more than the Social Innovation Fund. We will be sharing what we’re learning about scaling, nonprofit financial sustainability, building an evidence based and other related topics with all grantmakers big and small, urban and rural and government and private to make sure thousands of nonprofits have the resources they need to effectively tackle our most pressing social problems. To learn more about GEO and Scaling What Works, please go to http://www.geofunders.org.
BY Tim Glynn Burke
ON June 23, 2010 07:37 AM
I would like to suggest an additional channel for scaling social innovation that echoes the work that Tony Bowen wrote about: that laying the groundwork in communities, or building both a culture and an infrastructure of sorts for innovation and change might help grow the impact of both national and local efforts.
We explore these issues in more detail in our new book, which Jeff generously reviewed and made much better, The Power of Social Innovation (http://www.powerofsocialinnovation.com).
The WH Social Innovation Fund, Race to the Top, Louisiana’s Office of Social Entrepreneurship, and New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) innovation fund are public sector entities supporting the growth of social innovation. There are also a number of nonprofit and philanthropic efforts that look to incubate and grow local innovations or to import/replicate outside innovations in their city: Boston’s Greenlight Fund, Indianapolis’ Mind Trust, Virginia’s Phoenix Project, Portland’s Springboard Innovation, Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, Durham’s Bull City Forward, and others, many of which have been highlighted in this journal.
What might be missing in these efforts is a recognition that trying new ideas and then growing what works is not just a matter of testing and measuring and replicating. There are political costs and risks involved for public and private funders: risk of failure and subsequent damage to one’s reputation, a public official’s fear of getting his/her name in the newspaper for the wrong reason, opposition from incumbent providers and other interest groups invested in the status quo, short political cycles, close social networks between local foundation, business, and nonprofit leadership, etc.
Strong executive leadership from the President or a mayor can help create a culture of innovation, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg for example.
But I think we need to better understand how mobilization and building political will around innovation and change can also loosen the soil for growing social innovation. Social media is probably part of the answer, but the solution is also likely to include more mechanisms for securing feedback from clients, making information on the performance of our existing problem solving efforts more public, and using our innovation infrastructure to support advocacy and mobilizing groups as we support service providers. Also the Knight Foundation, which supported our research, is funding some very interesting work around new vehicles for community engagement and its connection to social innovation.
Best,
Tim
BY Michael Edwards
ON June 25, 2010 08:52 AM
“Finding ways to scale an organization’s impact without scaling its size is the new frontier in the field of social innovation” - this may be true for the field of social innovation (and thank godness the penny has finally dropped) but it isn’t true for the field of social change and develpment as a whole, which has been working on this “frontier” for the last twenty years or so, generating a rich literature in the process. For a good early summary readers might want to check out “Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World” that David Hulme and I edited way back in 1992 for Earthscan. Drawing from an international conference on “Scaling up NGO Impact in Development” held in 1991 and a large number of case studies from across the world, “Making a Difference” illustrates the many different paths to scaling-up that existed even then, and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses in way that seems to have gone missing in much of the literature on social innovation. Of course some of the cases now seem dated, but that analytic framework is just as useful today, especially in drawing attention to the trade-offs that exist between different strategies, and echoing some of the points in Jeff’s article above. It’s always good to recognize what we can learn from the past so that we don’t keep re-inventing the wheel.
BY Mazarine
ON June 29, 2010 10:33 PM
Dear Jeffrey,
As a former organizer, Obama knows that there are some ineffective nonprofits out there, which, of course, we appreciate. I love the emphasis on scaling, but can we address some of the things which prevent scaling?
Here are some tips:
Encourage making mistakes! Many nonprofits forget this is how you create innovation.
Invest in people not just with training, but actually make salaries attached to how long they have been there, and assessments of their job performance. Hire from within, and hire women, and people of color as leaders.
Get better board members, and make it worth their while to keep an eagle eye on the organization’s leadership. Make them angel investors of the organization.
Stop siloing, and encourage cross-cultural, cross-generational communication as a fundamental building block of your nonprofit. Weekly meetings. A staff newsletter. And most important: Training on Rankism.
I have more ideas on how to scale nonprofits and heal their biggest assumptions here, would love to get your comment on it: http://www.wildwomanfundraising.com/uncharitable-culture-of-destitution/
Sincerely,
Mazarine
BY johnnguyen.200885@gmail.com, [url=http://impactdriverexpert.com/]http://impactdriverexpert.com/[/url]
ON October 10, 2015 06:52 AM
Thanks you, nice website, I like your website. Learn more: http://bit.ly/1YDesMP
BY Rosa
ON June 26, 2021 12:21 PM
This article is very useful for me. Thank you.