How do you prepare your organization and partners to scale up your grant project?

1 Assess your readiness

Before you decide to scale up your grant project, you need to assess your readiness and feasibility. This means evaluating your project's goals, outcomes, and indicators, and how they align with the needs and priorities of your target population and stakeholders. You also need to consider your organizational capacity, resources, and systems, and how they can support the expansion of your project. Finally, you need to identify the potential risks, challenges, and opportunities that scaling up may entail, and how you can mitigate or leverage them.

2 Define your scaling strategy

Once you have assessed your readiness, you need to define your scaling strategy. This means determining the type, level, and pace of scaling up that suits your project. For example, you may want to scale up horizontally (reaching more beneficiaries or locations), vertically (influencing policies or systems), functionally (adding new components or services), or organizationally (growing your staff or infrastructure). You also need to set realistic and measurable objectives, timelines, and milestones for your scaling process, and how you will monitor and evaluate your progress and impact.

3 Engage your partners

Scaling up your grant project cannot be done in isolation. You need to engage your partners, both internal and external, in the planning and implementation of your scaling strategy. This means communicating clearly and regularly with your team, board, funders, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders, and soliciting their feedback and input. You also need to establish or strengthen your partnerships and networks with other organizations, institutions, or sectors that can support or complement your scaling efforts. For example, you may want to collaborate with local governments, media, or private sector actors that can help you access new resources, markets, or audiences.

4 Adapt your project design

Scaling up your grant project may require you to adapt your project design to fit the new context and conditions. This means reviewing and revising your project's logic model, theory of change, and activities, and ensuring that they are relevant, effective, and sustainable for the scaled-up scenario. You also need to consider the cultural, social, economic, and environmental factors that may affect your project's delivery and outcomes, and how you can address them. For example, you may need to customize your project's content, language, or format to suit the preferences and needs of different groups or regions.

5 Manage your resources

Scaling up your grant project may also require you to manage your resources more efficiently and strategically. This means allocating and mobilizing your financial, human, and material resources according to your scaling objectives and priorities, and ensuring that they are sufficient and flexible for the scaling process. You also need to optimize your processes and systems, such as accounting, reporting, procurement, or data management, and ensuring that they are scalable, reliable, and compliant. For example, you may need to automate, streamline, or outsource some of your tasks or functions to save time and costs.

6 Learn and improve

Scaling up your grant project is a continuous learning and improvement process that requires you to collect and analyze data, feedback, and lessons learned from your scaling experience. This means setting up and implementing a robust monitoring and evaluation system that can track and measure your scaling outputs, outcomes, and impacts, and identify the best practices and challenges. You also need to use the evidence and insights generated from your monitoring and evaluation system to inform and adjust your scaling strategy, project design, and resource management, and ensure that they are responsive and adaptive to the changing needs and realities of your project.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?