What do you do if your innovative social impact project needs to scale?

In my experience, scaling an innovative social impact project requires careful planning and strategic execution. It is important to create a detailed scaling strategy that outlines how will the project expand while maintaining its effectiveness and impact. Considering factors such as funding, partnerships, staffing, operations, and infrastructure are important. It is also important to Identify sources of funding to support the scaling process. This could include grants, donations, impact investment, or revenue-generating activities. It is also important to be prepared to iterate and adapt your scaling strategy based on feedback, lessons learned, and changing circumstances.

When it comes to assessing needs, first and foremost you’ll need to understand their nature. Let’s assume your social innovation addresses a very local need, such as integrated services for migrants women victim of violence in a specific neighborhood. This will help you identifying challenges and opportunities for your scaling approach, and you might end up in considering different options. For instance, some social innovations can be scaled-up, others are more easily to be scaled-out and some more suitable for scaling-in. A clear understanding of the needs you are addressing will help you define the scaling strategy.

When assessing your needs, try to define what success means for you and your team, and consider how you want to scale. Having a clear definition of "success" will enable you to set a clear mindset and expectations during the process.

Are you willing to scale your social innovation or rather the social impact you are generating? If the goal is to scale the social impact, a good way to ensure funding is to measure your social impact relying on some monetization techniques or methodologies, which will allow investors get repaid as long as you achieve predetermined social outcomes. Some sophisticated and expensive financial engineering will be required, but it often pays off. Especially because there is a growing market for social impact (governments, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, etc.). Hence, you will secure funding building financial architectures based on social impact. And you will scale.

Clarifying the primary objective between scaling innovation and amplifying social impact is crucial, as each demands distinct strategies and measurements. While leveraging monetization techniques for funding and engaging in financial engineering can be beneficial, it's vital to ensure alignment with core social values and mission integrity.

Compassionate Kozhikode (CK) in Kerala, India, led by the District Administration, shows how people working together can make a big difference. The project gathers thousands of individuals to spread kindness through teamwork. It's not just praised locally but also recognized worldwide for its impact, proving that when we join hands, we can truly change society for the better. CK inspires others to embrace compassion and empathy, showing the power of unity in creating positive change.

High quality social impact requires people and organisations to find ways to solve complete, complex, deep problems on a small, local level, before expanding their comprehensive solutions and supports. The space is not screaming out for more people, with small, single, short-term interventions or innovations that are scaled across lots of communities without the necessary support to see outcomes reached. For instance, when trying to address educational inequality, ensuring one community has high-quality, well-supported educational opportunities from infant to adulthood, is often better than distributing notebooks to multiple, under-resourced communities, without the support to utilise them properly. Scaled half-interventions are not ideal.