Dear authors, I found your article extremely helpful. I’m the founder and volunteer president of a small nonprofit in Las Vegas that is inspiring children through mentoring, leadership development, tennis and education. Our goal has always been to have the best possible product that can inspire and change lives more deeply than to reach a large volume of people. Your article gave me a lot of great ideas to answer the often asked question of how we will scale. We have already begun to duplicate our program in other cities by offering our insights free of charge as consultants with other nonprofits. After 12 years of work I feel we have stumbled upon a system and a philosophy that is extremely effective and your article helped inspire many ideas on how we can grow without diluting the quality of our program.
Now that our program is fairly solid we are beginning to get more involved in the grant writing process. I was wondering if you could Point me in the right direction to finding the most comprehensive list of foundations that offer grants to small nonprofits like ours. As a sidenote we are extremely proud that one of our young leaders just received a full scholarship to Stanford and will begin in the fall.
Lovely article! Our endgame as scavenger’s community striving in dumpsites and landfills is to show our local government that out of the refuse, we can be instrumental and be also part to development.
Composting alone can stir livelihood among the community, the urban marginalized sector, city scavengers. Our product, organic fertilizer is essential in food production in rural farming areas. it could also stir environmental education.
But why is it so difficult for our local leaders to see the web?
Honestly, I am tired. But lately realized that it is not enough to only make suggestions and/or concepts and proposals. You have to walk them yourselves.
A totally new career for 2015 should help us get tangible change.
Thank you so much for keeping the “flame” burning.
I really enjoyed this piece and thought it was spot on! For me the element of reach is too often missing when thinking about whether charities are achieving their mission. As you say, impact needs to be considered in the context of the total addressable challenge.
We’ve also been doing some thinking about scale at NPC, so please do take a look at our paper and see what you think: http://goo.gl/3gOULX
I still tend to use the term ‘scale’ to refer to other methods of increasing your reach beyond organisational growth, in the sense that you can scale up approaches and ideas through methods such as franchising and mainstreaming, but I think we agree on the same fundamental points.
There are many other options for increasing your reach beyond organisational growth. They might not be right in every case, but too often the question isn’t even asked. And as a result, as you point out, “to sustain a service indefinitely seems to be the default”.
At the moment we’re doing some work around creating the conditions to make methods like licensing and franchising work more effectively in the social sector. At present charities are asked to share ideas and be collaborative, but the way the system is set up incentivises them to be protective and competitive.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about your thoughts on the subject, and it would be good to keep in touch.
Alice and Andrew,
Congrats on a terrific article, which I thoroughly enjoyed!!
Few thoughts from the One Acre Fund side:
a) In our view, there is no reason why nonprofits should be discouraged from pursuing multiple endgames. For instance, we have a core model that fits well with the ‘sustained service’ endgame, but this core model serves as a great R&D hub to test other ‘business units’ that might have a different endgame. In our case, one such business unit is African government adoption of elements of our core program within their agricultural systems (e.g., adoption of One Acre Fund’s farmer training approach and materials within governments’ pre-existing extension systems). But we feel that discontinuing our core program to pursue only this line of work would be unwise, since our core program remains our learning laboratory for this (and other) pathways.
b) In a similar vein, the advice that nonprofits are likely to be most effective if they pursue an endgame that centers on creating a movement (open source / replication) or promoting government/commercial adoption was surprising to me. Movement-building and gov’t adoption is incredibly difficult work that few ultimately succeed at; even if a nonprofit is well-positioned to succeed due to the right kind of systems leadership, many external factors have to align for such endgames to bear fruit (not to mention the typically reduced impact per client that comes with others implementing a model). And (full) commercial adoption is rarely possible when the target population is ultra-poor. This leads me to a similar conclusion as above: nonprofits with proven core models would be foolish to abandon them (i.e., not pursue the sustained service endgame); better to continuously improve a high-impact (albeit lower scale) model and leverage this to create new business units that pursue one or more of the other pathways for mass-scale (albeit lower impact).
Thanks again for a terrific piece - I find the endgame options and descriptions extremely helpful and hope more nonprofits will think about endgame definition as a core part of a strong theory of change.
Most often this happen to a country or national government initiated programs. One good example is my country’s national greening program (NGP). A well defined end game to reforest a million hectares and a billion trees and many projected impacts they addresses.
Through an executive order, (E.O.26),16 national government agencies converged to implement the program (2011-2016) but the implementing guide lines limit only to forest trees and government lands.
The pre-determined end goal should be flexible and must also include private farm lands. Just like what had happened to typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastated areas. There are also many many other coconut & abaca farm lands constant battle with pest infestations throughout the country that needs help too.
National plans should be flexible and encourage sectoral programs to enable coordination among them as well. Establish a link and urgent support between national top-down assessment of the urgent need with bottom-up assessments from the affected communities themselves
“Community level focused plans should be considered and supported thereby promoting consolidated and coordinated adaptation responses. Resilience requires both national policy framework to mobilize resources and high resolution local plans to target those resources into the hands of those who need them for location specific needs.” (Bridging Concept & Practice for Climate Resilient Development)
For the Province of Southern Leyte Philippines Action 2015, we aim to raise 3 million coffee & cocoa seedlings.
COMMENTS
BY Ryan Wolfington
ON January 7, 2015 07:58 AM
Dear authors, I found your article extremely helpful. I’m the founder and volunteer president of a small nonprofit in Las Vegas that is inspiring children through mentoring, leadership development, tennis and education. Our goal has always been to have the best possible product that can inspire and change lives more deeply than to reach a large volume of people. Your article gave me a lot of great ideas to answer the often asked question of how we will scale. We have already begun to duplicate our program in other cities by offering our insights free of charge as consultants with other nonprofits. After 12 years of work I feel we have stumbled upon a system and a philosophy that is extremely effective and your article helped inspire many ideas on how we can grow without diluting the quality of our program.
Now that our program is fairly solid we are beginning to get more involved in the grant writing process. I was wondering if you could Point me in the right direction to finding the most comprehensive list of foundations that offer grants to small nonprofits like ours. As a sidenote we are extremely proud that one of our young leaders just received a full scholarship to Stanford and will begin in the fall.
Ryan
BY Nelson T. Enojo
ON January 8, 2015 06:42 PM
Lovely article! Our endgame as scavenger’s community striving in dumpsites and landfills is to show our local government that out of the refuse, we can be instrumental and be also part to development.
Composting alone can stir livelihood among the community, the urban marginalized sector, city scavengers. Our product, organic fertilizer is essential in food production in rural farming areas. it could also stir environmental education.
But why is it so difficult for our local leaders to see the web?
Honestly, I am tired. But lately realized that it is not enough to only make suggestions and/or concepts and proposals. You have to walk them yourselves.
A totally new career for 2015 should help us get tangible change.
Thank you so much for keeping the “flame” burning.
BY David Bull
ON January 15, 2015 07:31 AM
Hi,
I really enjoyed this piece and thought it was spot on! For me the element of reach is too often missing when thinking about whether charities are achieving their mission. As you say, impact needs to be considered in the context of the total addressable challenge.
We’ve also been doing some thinking about scale at NPC, so please do take a look at our paper and see what you think: http://goo.gl/3gOULX
I still tend to use the term ‘scale’ to refer to other methods of increasing your reach beyond organisational growth, in the sense that you can scale up approaches and ideas through methods such as franchising and mainstreaming, but I think we agree on the same fundamental points.
There are many other options for increasing your reach beyond organisational growth. They might not be right in every case, but too often the question isn’t even asked. And as a result, as you point out, “to sustain a service indefinitely seems to be the default”.
At the moment we’re doing some work around creating the conditions to make methods like licensing and franchising work more effectively in the social sector. At present charities are asked to share ideas and be collaborative, but the way the system is set up incentivises them to be protective and competitive.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about your thoughts on the subject, and it would be good to keep in touch.
David
BY Matthew Forti, One Acre Fund
ON January 25, 2015 05:56 PM
Alice and Andrew,
Congrats on a terrific article, which I thoroughly enjoyed!!
Few thoughts from the One Acre Fund side:
a) In our view, there is no reason why nonprofits should be discouraged from pursuing multiple endgames. For instance, we have a core model that fits well with the ‘sustained service’ endgame, but this core model serves as a great R&D hub to test other ‘business units’ that might have a different endgame. In our case, one such business unit is African government adoption of elements of our core program within their agricultural systems (e.g., adoption of One Acre Fund’s farmer training approach and materials within governments’ pre-existing extension systems). But we feel that discontinuing our core program to pursue only this line of work would be unwise, since our core program remains our learning laboratory for this (and other) pathways.
b) In a similar vein, the advice that nonprofits are likely to be most effective if they pursue an endgame that centers on creating a movement (open source / replication) or promoting government/commercial adoption was surprising to me. Movement-building and gov’t adoption is incredibly difficult work that few ultimately succeed at; even if a nonprofit is well-positioned to succeed due to the right kind of systems leadership, many external factors have to align for such endgames to bear fruit (not to mention the typically reduced impact per client that comes with others implementing a model). And (full) commercial adoption is rarely possible when the target population is ultra-poor. This leads me to a similar conclusion as above: nonprofits with proven core models would be foolish to abandon them (i.e., not pursue the sustained service endgame); better to continuously improve a high-impact (albeit lower scale) model and leverage this to create new business units that pursue one or more of the other pathways for mass-scale (albeit lower impact).
Thanks again for a terrific piece - I find the endgame options and descriptions extremely helpful and hope more nonprofits will think about endgame definition as a core part of a strong theory of change.
BY Nelson T. Enojo
ON January 25, 2015 09:48 PM
Most often this happen to a country or national government initiated programs. One good example is my country’s national greening program (NGP). A well defined end game to reforest a million hectares and a billion trees and many projected impacts they addresses.
Through an executive order, (E.O.26),16 national government agencies converged to implement the program (2011-2016) but the implementing guide lines limit only to forest trees and government lands.
The pre-determined end goal should be flexible and must also include private farm lands. Just like what had happened to typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastated areas. There are also many many other coconut & abaca farm lands constant battle with pest infestations throughout the country that needs help too.
National plans should be flexible and encourage sectoral programs to enable coordination among them as well. Establish a link and urgent support between national top-down assessment of the urgent need with bottom-up assessments from the affected communities themselves
“Community level focused plans should be considered and supported thereby promoting consolidated and coordinated adaptation responses. Resilience requires both national policy framework to mobilize resources and high resolution local plans to target those resources into the hands of those who need them for location specific needs.” (Bridging Concept & Practice for Climate Resilient Development)
For the Province of Southern Leyte Philippines Action 2015, we aim to raise 3 million coffee & cocoa seedlings.