By Jeffrey Bradach and Abe Grindle
In just 12 years, Gerald Chertavian has
nurtured Year Up from start-up to star
status among nonprofits that offer job
training and educational support to
disadvantaged urban young adults. A
remarkable 84 percent of Year Up’s graduates
land full-time jobs or enroll in college
within four months of completing their
yearlong skills-training and internship program.
Such success has propelled the program’s
steady climb from 22 students in one
city in 2001 to more than 2,000 students in
12 cities today.
Year Up’s growth can be captured by a
simple catchphrase: “scaling what works.”
It is a phrase that has energized social entrepreneurs
and philanthropists alike,
and a rallying cry to direct more funding
to interventions that actually get results.
Leaders such as the Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation,1 Grantmakers for Effective
Organizations,2 Results for America, the
Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, and
many others have worked tirelessly to advance
this effort. Even the federal government
embraced the idea. Soon after taking
office in 2009, President Obama launched
initiatives to identify and support social
programs with proven benefits.
But success has its limits. Chertavian
now confronts a dilemma shared by many
other successful social entrepreneurs.3
He has a proven program and steady site-by-site growth. Yet Year Up reaches only a
tiny fraction of the 6.7 million low-income
young adults in the United States who are out of work and out of school. “Given the
magnitude of the problem, we can’t be satisfied
with a plan that just doubles the size of
Year Up,” says Chertavian. “We need a new
path to close the gap between what we’ve
achieved to date and what we still need to
accomplish.”
That new path requires innovative ways
of thinking about scale. It is no longer sufficient
simply to scale up what works in an
incremental manner. Three years ago, a
Stanford Social Innovation Review article
proposed the notion of scaling impact rather
than organizations, asking, “How can we
achieve 100× the results with just 2× the organization?”4 More recently, Chertavian and
other social sector pioneers have started to
tackle an even more fundamental question:
How can we grow our impact to actually solve
problems we care about? In short, how can
we achieve truly transformative scale?
Strategies for Transformative Scale
In their quest for answers, pioneers such as
Year Up and the organizations that follow are
experimenting with ways to help far more
people while keeping a lid on the growth of
their own organizations. Reviewing their efforts
to date, we can identify nine approaches
that hold real promise for addressing at a
transformative scale a number of major social
problems. The approaches that follow aren’t
exhaustive, nor are they necessarily new. But
they represent a set of experiments that build on all our progress to date and could grow impact
in ways that lead to lasting solutions.
1. Distribute through existing platforms.
One way to scale up a project is to hitch a ride
with an existing network or system that can
replicate a program in hundreds,or even
thousands, of locations.
Sixty percent of Americans live within
three miles of a YMCA (Y). Capitalizing on
this fact, the national Y is using its nationwide
network of community Ys to spread
a diabetes prevention program that originated
with the National Institutes of Health
(NIH).5 By altering participants’ eating and
exercise habits, the program reduces the incidence
of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent in
people at risk for the disease.
Critical to the success of this effort was
the Y’s ability to create a sustainable funding
model for the program. The original
NIH model involved health professionals
working one-on-one with high-risk people,
a high-cost approach that prevented widespread
adoption. Together with the Indiana
University School of Medicine, the Y adapted
the program to a group model led by trained
community instructors. Using this model,
which delivered the same compelling results
at one-fourth the cost, the Y was able to persuade
health insurers to reimburse program
costs. That, in turn, cleared the way for the Y
to expand the program to 614 locations, with
many more to come.6
The potential to deliver successful programs
using the existing infrastructure of
a national nonprofit network is huge, but
getting there won’t be easy. Any initiative
that chooses to go this route has to figure
out how to ensure that providers in a widely
dispersed network can reliably deliver consistent
results.7 This means investing in
systems such as network-wide performance
measurement. Social entrepreneurs who
wish to extend their impact via networks
will also have to relinquish some control to
achieve the scale they seek.
2. Recruit (and train!) others to deliver
the solution. Rather than relying on a single
player, such as the Y, to help bring a program
or initiative to a larger scale, it’s possible to
teach a collection of unrelated nonprofits or
agencies to deliver a successful program to
far greater numbers of beneficiaries.
Year Up chose this route when it partnered
with Miami Dade Community College
in 2012 to establish the Professional
Training Corps. Modeled after the Reserve
Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), this program
sets students on an associate degree
track while providing them with the small
cohesive community, high-quality professional
development, and internship experience
that mirror the Year Up program. The
pilot, if successful, will provide a template
for spreading the program to community
colleges across the country and reaching a
projected 100,000 students a year.
Organizations that pursue this pathway
typically must build a new set of capabilities.
“Doing”—actually delivering a program—and “enabling”—training another
organization do so—are two quite different
processes, and it’s important to be very clear
about what is required to do enabling well.
3. Unbundle and scale up the parts that
have the greatest impact. Successful social-sector initiatives typically involve lots
of moving parts that combine to deliver the
desired results. But what if you don’t need
all the parts to get the same or nearly the
same results? If you can identify the essential
components that account for most of the
impact but require only a fraction of the total
cost and effort, it may be possible to break
them out and take them to a large scale.
KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program,
is a national network of public charter schools
that has taken this approach to leadership
training. Since opening its first two schools
in 1995, KIPP’s network has grown to serve
more than 50,000 students in 141 schools in
20 states and the District of Columbia.
Two years ago, KIPP launched the Leadership
Design Fellowship, an eight-month
program for public and charter school district
administrators that provides intensive training
on KIPP’s principal-development model.
KIPP chose leadership development because
of its core belief that outstanding schools are built, led, and sustained by great leaders. The
idea behind the fellowship program is that
its graduates—some of whom lead districts
with hundreds of thousands of students—will
implement KIPP’s principal-training model
in their own districts, thus extending KIPP’s
impact without adding to its size.
In contrast to trying to replicate an entire
program or initiative, the lower cost and
broad reach of leadership training may make
this type of unbundling a very good investment
for dramatically increasing impact.
4. Use technology to reach a larger audience.
Technology can provide another lower-
cost pathway to growing a program’s reach
and impact. Khan Academy, for example, delivers
instructional videos online to millions
of people around the globe. As a result, the
organization has remained very small even
as its audience has exploded.
Even traditional nonprofits can use
technology to accelerate the spread of an
existing program or practice.8 College Summit,
whose mission is to help increase college
enrollment and success rates among
low-income high school graduates, has gone
this route. With a $2.5 million grant from
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, College
Summit developed 20 Facebook apps
that will help guide low-income students
through the college admission process and
support their success on campus. Apps deliver
automated alerts for important deadlines,
facilitate formation of student support
groups, and guide students through
the process of transferring from community
college to a four-year university, among
other services. Time will tell whether this
experiment succeeds. What’s clear today is
that this kind of technology-enabled project
could help nonprofits significantly expand
the reach and impact of their work.
5. Don’t just build organizations and programs,
strengthen a field. Nonprofits and
funders committed to far-reaching social
change understand that their goals cannot
be reached without the support of a critical
mass of organizations and individuals working
together as a field. Key players include
policymakers, researchers, community
groups, service-delivery enterprises, advocacy
groups, talent recruiters, funders and
investors, and others.9 Field-building strategies
often follow one of two paths: growing
the field by raising awareness of an issue to generate support and funding, or improving
the performance of existing players already
committed to the field.
Building on the evidence base created
by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America in the
1990s, MENTOR: The National Mentoring
Partnership exemplifies both approaches.
More than 5,000 organizations provide
mentoring to three million disadvantaged
young people, but another 15 million youths
need these services. Moreover, not all kids
currently enrolled in mentoring programs
are served effectively. MENTOR works to
close this gap by enhancing the quality and
quantity of mentoring relationships for
America’s youth. Its goals are to increase
the resources and capacity of the mentoring
field to reach more young people and
to improve the effectiveness of the field by
developing and disseminating standards,
research, and tools. This field-building effort
complements the work of Big Brothers
Big Sisters of America, the largest mentoring
organization in the United States, which
reaches more than 200,000 young people—but still only a fraction of those in need.
Fields also need data and metrics to
track and improve performance and to
channel resources to what is working. Expanded
use of data—thanks in large part to
the advent of low-cost information technology
platforms—is one of the most powerful
forces shaping fields today. The Strive initiative
in Cincinnati, Ohio, has rallied a range
of players around shared performance
metrics for supporting the success of every
child “from cradle to career.”10 And the Millennium
Development Goals harness the
power of measurement to drive the field of
global development, just as the Common
Core standards are driving the use of data
to strengthen US public education. Such efforts
align the strategies of diverse players
toward common goals, enable assessments
of what is working on the ground, and support
learning and improvement.
Others have pursued leadership development
as a way to improve the performance of
an existing field. For example, in K–12 education,
organizations like New Leaders for
New Schools, the Broad Superintendents
Academy, The New Teachers Project, Teach
for America, and the Center for Inspired
Teaching have produced a wave of leadership
talent, which has helped to shape the education
reform movement. It is striking that few
other fields have such a robust leadership development pipeline, which may bode ill
for their ability to achieve true transformative
scale and impact even given significant
programmatic innovations.
One caution is that field-building investments
take a long time to play out, and their
effectiveness can be difficult to assess. But
in many instances, the absence of appropriate
investments in field infrastructure, from
training organizations to matchmakers for
mergers and collaborations,11 severely limits
the potential for transformative impact.
6. Change public systems. Our public systems,
such as education, juvenile justice,
and child welfare, operate at a vast scale.
But too often they are not achieving impact
at scale. Public system reformers often pursue
one of three distinct avenues to achieve
transformative impact: change a critical
component of the system; inspire change by demonstrating a better way and embarking
on a change management process; or gradually
inject new leadership.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is
choosing the first approach in its efforts to
change the juvenile justice system. Over the
past 20 years, the grantmaker has invested
more than $100 million to try to change
decisions about whether to send a troubled
young person to jail, to a detention facility,
or to home-based rehabilitation. Rigorous
evaluations show that the home-based option
championed by the foundation works
best for most kids. The program has spread
to 200 sites in 39 states and is poised to continue
growing. (See “The Road to Scale Runs
Through Public Systems.”)
Teach for America demonstrates an approach
to changing a system that relies on
an infusion of new leadership and talent.
With 170 full-time staff members devoted
to alumni services, it is investing heavily in
the continued development and placement
of its 30,000 alumni, with the goal of injecting
highly capable, reform-minded leaders
into critical positions within the education
system and other public and private entities
that affect it. The goal is to achieve impact at a transformative scale by changing the education
system from the inside out.
These examples acknowledge and respond
to a simple truth: the path to transformative
scale in sprawling public systems
requires changing the systems themselves.
Otherwise, as Casey Foundation CEO Patrick
McCarthy notes, “A bad system will
trump a good program every time.”
7. Embrace the need for policy change.
Government funding is often considered
the Holy Grail for social-sector initiatives.
An act of Congress, for example, can theoretically
turn a demonstration project into
a national standard overnight. Well-known
examples include the adoption of hospice
care, which spread nationwide after gaining
Medicare reimbursement; and state-funded
kindergarten, which began as privately
funded programs in a number of cities but transitioned to public dollars in response to
widespread demand.12
The Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP)
provides a contemporary example. NFP
serves low-income, first-time mothers by
partnering them with a registered nurse who
provides ongoing home visits that continue
through the child’s second birthday. Today
NFP reaches more than 26,000 mothers in
43 states. When well implemented, the program
has been shown to provide $5.70 in
benefits to society for every dollar spent.13
In 2010, Congress established the Maternal,
Infant, and Early Childhood Home
Visiting Program and committed $1.5 billion
over five years to expand and improve
state-administered home visitation for
expectant and new mothers. (Currently, 13
home visiting programs meet federal eligibility
criteria.) The legislation was the result
of a concerted lobbying campaign led by the
Nurse-Family Partnership National Service
Office and supported by President Obama,
among others.
At the same time that it provides a model
for policy change that leads to larger scale, this
example also illustrates the challenges facing
any social initiative advanced by the federal government. The 13 programs approved for
federal funding are not identical, and many
states are ill-equipped to identify which programs
will provide the best outcomes given
their particular context and needs. As the Pew
Center on the States concluded in 2011, many
states “are not prepared to capture or maximize
the additional investment.”14
8. Don’t ignore for-profit models for
scale. In some cases, a for-profit business
model might be the most effective strategy
to achieve transformative scale. In the
developing world, businesses have helped
meet the basic needs of many millions of
the poorest people, providing necessities
such as clean water, health care, electricity,
agricultural supplies, communications,
and financial services. In Mexico, Farmacias
Similares became a runaway hit by selling
prescription medicine for at least 30 percent
less than the competition and by making
doctors available for $2 a visit.15
Sometimes nonprofits and philanthropists
can unleash the scaling power of forprofits
by demonstrating the viability of a
new market or business. Microfinance is the
classic example. The concept started out as
a project run by nonprofits and government
agencies. Over time, these organizations built
a track record of sufficient scale and financial
performance. The result: commercial entities—and eventually the enormous for-profit capital markets—saw potential and dramatically
scaled up the industry.
Many market-based approaches to social
problems require a combination of nonprofit,
philanthropic, and government support
to prove that an innovation is worthy
of for-profit investment.16 None of these examples
is intended to suggest that for-profits
are the solution in every circumstance, or
to minimize the significant challenges that
can emerge as they try to balance profit and
social impact. Yet because of access to enormous
capital markets and a business model
that inherently promotes greater scale, we
need to understand how for-profits can be
part of the solution to many social problems.
9. Alter people’s attitudes, beliefs, and
behaviors. For a certain category of issues,
impact at a transformative scale requires altering
the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of
many people so that the change becomes the
new social norm.17
Public health and issue-based advocacy
groups, among others, have developed
an extensive suite of social marketing and
grassroots-organizing tools that they deploy
to obtain these results. Two recent innovations
are worth special attention.
First, more and more organizations are
building informal, peer-to-peer networks
to achieve transformative scale. This work
is based on the understanding that many
norms and practices are shaped in a community,
and therefore certain types of
changes must be scaled through the community.
In Senegal, the practice of female
genital mutilation was largely eliminated in
one generation through the work of Tostan,
an African-based nonprofit that helped to
spark discussions and advocacy among villagers
that spread from village to village.18
Second, a burgeoning body of work in
behavioral economics and psychology helps
us understand how people make both large
and small choices in everyday life. Sometimes
those choices are harmful both to the
person and to society. The UK government
recently created the Behavioral Insights
Team, aka the “Nudge Unit,” which aims to
steer people to better choices though small
behavioral changes. For example, standard
letters warning people to pay their overdue
car tax get only about an 11 percent response.
A simpler test letter declaring in big letters
“Pay your tax or lose your [make of car]” got
double the response.19 Another test letter
with a photo of the car in question got triple
the response rate. Many of the issues that the
social-change sector cares most about affecting,
such as health, education, and criminal
justice, are rooted in behavioral choices that
may be subject to similar nudges.
Considerations for Making Headway
All of these strategies hold promise for moving
from selective and limited impact to
transformative scale. Exploring them will
require experiments (and some failures).
But in the long run, the social returns can be
huge. At the same time, it’s important that we
are realistic about the magnitude of the work
ahead. A few cross-cutting considerations
are important no matter which strategy one
chooses to pursue.
Be clear about success. Crystal-clear
objectives are an essential component
of any strategy. To achieve transformative
scale, your core objective must be
to solve the problem, rather than simply
to expand a successful program.
Focus on a well-defined unit of
impact. Without evidence of impact,
there’s no reason to scale up. Always be
clear about the impact you are aiming
for, and measure continuously to ensure
that you are achieving it. Keep an
eye on whether a new pathway is actually
serving the intended population, a
common pitfall of technology solutions
and for-profit models.
Rethink capitalization. All transformative
scale strategies require thinking
differently about capital, both what we
are willing to fund (such as overhead
and infrastructure) and the amount
of initial capital and ongoing revenue
required to scale up. Funders also need
to provide risk capital, knowing that in
the quest for big solutions some experiments
inevitably will fail.
Innovate to drive down costs. One of
the great barriers to scale is the cost of
interventions. Although it is generally
true that you get what you pay for, the
social sector has much to learn from social
innovators in developing countries
who have no choice but to hold costs at
rock-bottom from the very start as they
aim to serve great numbers of people.
Focus on driving demand. Both “supply”
and “demand” are required for
transformative scale. It isn’t enough to
focus only on supply, with a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. Truly unlocking
demand can be a game-changer.
Invest in new capabilities. Grantmakers
should keep in mind that
transformative scale often requires
substantial investment in capabilities
that many nonprofits don’t currently
possess. That means funding nonprofits
to make training investments, hire
new people, or adopt new technology
or more sophisticated financial management
systems.
Engage the community. The success
of transformative scale strategies often
hinges on the involvement of local communities
in the formulation and implementation
of the solution. Knowledge
of local circumstances and engagement
of local players can be critical to helping
a solution spread and stick.
Taking “what works” to transformative
scale will be the defining challenge of the social sector in the coming decade. The hard
work of figuring out how to do that has begun.
Now we need to test which strategies are truly
practical, perfect them, and ultimately push
ourselves to new ways of thinking and acting
that will determine our ability to address in
full the most important challenges facing this
country and the world.
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