What is scaling social impact and why is it so hard? Pivoting to Impact cuts across sectors and geographies to distill critical lessons learned for all social enterprises and funders seeking impact at scale.
Pivoting to Impact shares key takeaways about scale:
- Scaling social impact is about more than simply organizational size/growth. As Sally Osberg and Roger Martin state in Getting Beyond Better, “scale is not determined by an organization’s size or budget, but by the change it helps to usher in.”
- The journey to scaled impact is not linear but involves many pivots. Reaching impact at scale is often about disrupting the status quo, which requires experimentation, feedback loops — and even failure — along the way.
- There are also multiple paths that you can pursue to achieve scale — organic growth is certainly one but also partnering, open source, advocacy and more.
- And finally, social enterprises often face common road blocks to achieving scale…
Five common roadblocks to scale are described in this report along with tips and advice for entrepreneurs and funders on how to navigate and overcome these challenges. These five common roadblocks include:
- Not having the right foundations (people, systems, and infrastructure) in place
- Not setting processes and systems for tracking and responding to data
- Not iterating and adapting on the path to scale;
- Not leveraging partners effectively enough; and,
- Not zooming out from the day-to-day operational details to see opportunities and avoid opportunity costs.
Find the full Pivoting to Impact study: https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/final-scaling-pathways-pivoting-to-impact-5-11-17/