Launching and Scaling Social Ventures Insights

Social entrepreneurs draw upon the best thinking from the business and nonprofit worlds to develop and launch innovative strategies to address unmet needs and drive social change. After testing and iterating on models to find the most effective model to meet the needs of beneficiaries, social enterprises can choose between many different strategies to scale their impact to drive more significant change. Find highlights from CASE’s work related to launching and scaling social ventures below, or search our knowledge database for more.  

Foundations of Scale | Overcoming Key Scaling Challenges | Case Studies | Interviews with Scaling Leaders

Start here: Foundations of Scale

Article

Scaling Social Impact Foundational article by CASE founders laying out a framework for a larger set of pathways for pursing scale.

Article

Pivoting to Impact: Navigating the Road to Scale What is scaling and why is it so hard? We cut across sectors and geographies to distill lessons for all enterprises and funders seeking impact at scale.

Guide

4 Pathways to Scaling Impact Each pathway can help an enterprise think about its role in the ultimate solution as well as the implications on its operating model, funding, and more.

Video

Impact Explained: Scaling vs. Scaling IMPACT There is a big difference between scaling your organization and scaling your impact, as this video explains.

Video

4 Pathways to Impact at Scale Understand the four main pathways to scale and considerations to pursuing them.

Tool

Scaling Readiness Diagnostic Answer questions in 7 key areas and receive a results guide to your next most important steps to scaling impact.

Best Practices for Overcoming Key Scaling Challenges

Article

Why We Didn’t Fund Your Scaling Plan A checklist to avoid common problems that funders have identified in evaluating applications.

Report

Financing for Scaled Impact Tips and advice to maximize the impact of external funding and effectively leverage internal options to fuel the scaling journey.

Report

Leveraging Government Partnerships Insights and tactics for effectively leveraging government partnerships to scale impact.

Report

Using Data to Power Scale Tactics for setting a data foundation grounded in equity, the building blocks for a robust system and process, and strategies as you grow, partner, or pursue systems change.

Report

People Matter: Evolving Talent to Drive Impact at Scale Tips for evolving organizational structure, leveraging outside capacity, and maintaining culture through scale.

Find more insights from the Scaling Pathways series, authored by CASE in partnership with the Skoll Foundation, USAID, and Mercy Corps Ventures.

Looking for more resources about navigating scale? Search our knowledge database for scaling.

Case Studies

Case Study

VisionSpring VisionSpring launched — and then shuttered — a retail “hub and spoke” model in Latin America. The scaling experiment led to valuable lessons about knowing when to pivot and preparing to fail.

Case Study

Evidence Action After a successful RCT and pilot, Evidence Action’s scaling efforts led to decreasing impact. It took a step back to focus on behavior change, right-sizing data collection, and improving infrastructure.

Case Study

Imazon Recognizing that they could not solve deforestation alone, Imazon scaled its impact through government partnerships and open source data — rather than growing its organization.

Case Studies

Our Scaling Snapshots are mini case studies of ventures’ scaling journeys, including pathways and lessons learned:

Looking for more case studies? Search our knowledge database for case study

Interviews with Scaling Leaders

Podcast

Elisa Villanueva Beard The CEO of Teach for America talks abou tthe balance of centralization vs. decentralization in scaling a national organization.

Video

Scaling Through Mass Disruption Gregory Rockson, founder of mPharma, shares his tips on scaling through mass disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video

Alden Zecha Co-Founder and CFO for Sproxil talks about challenges and lessons learned in scaling a social venture.

For more podcast episodes and videos, visit the CASE in Point podcast page and our CASE Chats video library.

Looking for more resources on launching and scaling social enterprises? Search the CASE Knowledge Database