Scaling Impact

Launched in 2013, the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) was a five-year collaborative project between the U.S. Agency for International Development, CASE, and Innovations in Healthcare.  Through engaging 25 global health social ventures within a learning accelerator, leveraging of the impact investing ecosystem, a implementing a robust research agenda, and involving students and faculty, […]

Recognizing that they could not solve deforestation alone, Imazon scaled its impact through government partnerships and open source data — rather than growing its organization. Erin Worsham, Catherine Clark, Robyn Fehrman 2017

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. Erin Worsham, Robyn Fehrman, Catherine Clark 2017

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. Erin Worsham, Robyn Fehrman, Cathy Clark 2017

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: Five common roadblocks to scale are described in this report along with tips […]

By Cathy Clark, Cynthia W. Massarsky, Tamara Schweitzer Raben and Erin Worsham With support from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), the authors set out to document and analyze the currently available literature on scaling, in order to both highlight the best set of resources available that are useful to funders actively pursuing grantmaking strategies around […]

By Paul N. Bloom Scaling means achieving more efficient, effective, and widespread adoption of an innovation–getting a huge bang for the bucks invested. Whether you want to become the next Google or the next Habitat for Humanity, scaling is a key goal–one that presents a complex problem. There isn’t a universal secret sauce for scaling […]

By Paul N. Bloom For a social entrepreneur with an innovative solution, the holy grail is scaling it—that is, taking it to a level where the new approach operates efficiently and effectively to achieve significant mitigation of a social problem. Indeed, many are under real pressure to scale as their supporters, not unlike investors in […]

By Paul N. Bloom and Brett R. Smith The scaling of social entrepreneurial impact is an important issue in the field of social entrepreneurship. While researchers have focused relatively little theoretical and empirical attention on scaling, a recently proposed set of drivers of scaling – incorporated into what has been labeled the SCALERS model – […]

By J. Gregory Dees Scaling impact is a very serious and challenging issue, but we need a better way of framing the conversation. The author proposes three reframing steps:• Reframing step # 1: Shift from “can” to “how can”• Reframing step #2: Explore all methods for scaling impact• Reframing step #3: Accept scale as a […]