Scaling Capacities

• Social entrepreneurships can focus data collection and analysis efforts, while managing associated expenses, by being thoughtful upfront about what purposes data are needed for, prioritizing these purposes, and allowing these priorities to drive the timing of investments.
• Many successfully-scaled social entrepreneurship efforts nurture a hunger for feedback and information in the organizational culture. By establishing a “data-minded” organizational culture, collecting and using data become habits that perpetuate themselves, rather than burdens that staff dread. As part of establishing a “data-minded” culture, an organization can build into staff meetings, retreats, and planning processes time to reflect on information that has been collected on the environment in which the effort operates and the effectiveness of services provided. Depending on size and structure, it may be appropriate to create a dedicated position—possibly filled by a social scientist or scientist—dedicated to organizational learning.
• The best metrics are those that are meaningful to the effort at hand. Many “ideal” indicators of the impact of social change efforts elude measurement, and there are numerous limitations to existing metrics in most fields. As Teach for America’s Kevin Huffman advises, “For your most important outcomes, develop measures, even if they are imperfect. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
• Effective technology makes data storage, analysis, and reporting efficient, reducing human resource costs. Investments in data systems can be an extremely strategic use of precious resources for infrastructure development.

Codifying What Works


Defining this Scaling Capacity and How it Supports Scaling

To codify what works is to make explicit precisely how the social entrepreneurship’s innovation affects change. In his article “Going to Scale,” Jeffrey Bradach proposes the principle of minimum critical specification: organizations should focus replication on those program elements that are absolutely necessary in order to achieve program success. The program models we encountered were most often some combination of the following four components:

(1) a documented program or curriculum;
(2) policies or principles;
(3) organizational structure; and
(4) organizational culture.

Codifying what works is a valuable capacity at any time in an organization’s life, but especially so when scaling. It provides a blueprint for new sites and affiliate organizations to replicate the innovation. It also exposes hidden assumptions about what is critical for program success and allows them to be tested against reality. Codifying what works also can serve as a valuable tool for communicating internally and externally how an organization makes a difference.


Examples of Effective Practice: Codifying the Model

The power in codifying what works for scaling is illuminated in the example of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. was founded in 1935 by Bill W., a New York stockbroker, and Dr. Bob S., an Akron physician, to help individuals recover from alcoholism and addiction. The early years were marked by modest growth: by 1939, there were only three A.A. groups which together had helped 100 alcoholics get sober. That same year, however, Bill took a critical step in scaling A.A.: he codified the methods and philosophy of the nascent organization in a basic textbook titled Alcoholics Anonymous, the core of which was the Twelve Steps to Recovery.

Bill supplemented a description of A.A.’s approach with case histories of some 30 recovered members. The text sparked interest in A.A. and also provided a clear and simple explanation of how A.A. works so others could start new groups. The articulation of A.A.’s approach helped foster a period of rapid growth. Between 1940 and 1950, A.A.’s membership grew from 2,000 to 100,000 recovering alcoholics worldwide.

However, with this rapid growth also came great uncertainty. How could A.A. support the thousands of new groups that had developed and ensure that they stayed intact and effective? In 1946, A.A. codified what it had learned to be the key principles for effectively running an A.A. group in what are known as its Twelve Traditions.

Enumerating these principles provided crucial guidance for individual groups to know how to govern themselves effectively. By 1950, much of the chaos surrounding the rapid growth of A.A. had subsided. Codifying the Twelve Traditions also enabled A.A. to scale with minimal assistance by a central office. In fact, A.A.—an organization with over 100,000 groups around the world—has a central service office staffed by only 85 people. Having a clear model enables organizations to be more flexible about who implements that model, thus lowering human resource costs.

BAIF Research Development Foundation also exemplifies the power that codifying what works can have on lowering the human resource costs of scaling. BAIF develops and implements agricultural technology solutions—such as cross-breeding more productive cattle or developing fruit orchards on degraded wastelands—that help rural farmers increase their production and earn a sustainable livelihood. Initially, BAIF placed technical experts in the field to train villagers on how to implement the technology solutions, but was unable to successfully retain these technical staff. In order to adapt, BAIF standardized the technical models enough to be able to train local villagers to teach farmers in the new methods.

Codifying these models enabled BAIF to lower the cost of technology transfer as local volunteers were now training farmers while technical staff focused on developing and codifying the technical models.

Balancing structural control and flexibility


• The appropriate relationship between the central and local office depends on a variety of factors, most notably, the complexity of the organization’s model, the desired speed of scaling, and the resources available. A tighter relationship often costs more and means slower expansion but offers greater control that can be important for replicating complex models. When control is not as critical for scaling, a looser branching relationship or affiliate relationship offers more flexibility to scale quickly and with fewer resources.

• Effective communication of successful strategies and lessons learned across sites can ease the need for excessive control by the central office. By highlighting strategies that have worked well, an organization spreads effective practices to local offices while avoiding formal commands and strictures from the central office.

• Assessing local offices on outcomes more than process enables greater flexibility for innovation and autonomy while still rigorously adhering to performance and quality standards.

• Over time, balancing control and flexibility as an organization grows increasingly becomes a management challenge. As organizations mature, they increasingly rely on staff with management skills and experience- individuals who can manage larger groups of people in a way that fosters excellence, accountability and creativity. Because management skills come at a premium, organizations are well served to plan ahead for this need and for the additional resources required to attract high quality management-level staff.

• Developing and maintaining a strong, up-to-date technology infrastructure can be a critical aid for managing organizational growth and creating efficiencies. In some instances, communication technology is vital for an organization to be able to function and coordinate its work among different sites. Networking technology can also enable greater flexibility and fluidity for where work happens and how information flows through the organizational network, thus reducing the need for a command-and-control structure from the central office.

Balancing Control and Flexibility

Defining this Scaling Capacity and How It Supports Scaling

Scaling, particularly when it entails organizational expansion, places great strain on organizational and management structures. At tension are the dual needs of control and flexibility in the relationship between local offices/affiliates and the central office.

The central office needs to ensure that the work of local offices continues to adhere to the organization’s mission, model, values, and standards while remaining flexible enough to allow for context-appropriate variation and innovation across the various locales. The balance between control and flexibility will not only be different for different organizations and different settings, but also at different points in the scaling process.


Examples of Effective Practice in Balancing Structural Control and Flexibility

There are several factors that have implications for how “tight” the relationship is between the central office and branches. The primary factors are: the complexity of the organizational model (more complex models often require more control from a central office to replicate faithfully); resources available (opening a new branch costs more, and requires more human resources from a central office); and the desired speed of expansion (forming an affiliation with another organization is often faster, and requires less central control). The cases of Childline and City Year illustrate how these factors affect the balance between control and flexibility.

Childline was started by Jeroo Billimoria to provide emergency telephone assistance for India’s burgeoning population of street children. Billimoria knew that Childline needed to be in cities across India but she wanted to keep the organization relatively small with minimal overhead costs. Instead of opening branch offices, Childline partners with a local organization in each city to operate the helpline. These affiliates are supported by the Childline India Foundation which plays a coordinating role and focuses on training and quality control.

Each affiliate must use the Childline brand name, logo, and telephone number, and maintain service quality based on clearly defined methodologies. This looser affiliate relationship between central and local offices allowed for the creation of new helplines where necessary without much expansion of the organization itself. The relative simplicity of Childline’s model also enabled expansion through affiliation rather than branching.

City Year recruits and places young people in community service projects worldwide. In contrast to Childline, City Year’s founders felt that the organizational model was too complex to be faithfully replicated by affiliates that were not steeped in City Year’s work. Instead, for each new site launched, the national headquarters would dispatch a team to the given city and hire and train local staff who would then report back to the national office. This choice to have tighter control between the central office and local sites, while slower and more costly than partnering with independent affiliates, helped them ensure faithful adherence to their more complicated model.

In addition to deciding how tight the relationship between the central office and local offices will be, there are also management strategies and structures that can help an organization balance control and flexibility. Teach for America (TFA) serves as a good example. TFA recruits, trains, and places recent college graduates as teachers in America’s neediest public schools. TFA operates in 22 sites around the country and each site has a local office that is responsible for working with the school district to place and support corps members as well as to conduct outreach and fundraising.

As the organization grew, the central office felt it was important to help local offices avoid mistakes and learn from the experiences of the other local offices while still providing autonomy and flexibility to innovate. In order to strike this balance, they have developed a regional management structure that facilitates communication among the local executive directors and synthesizes and distributes successful practices and strategies for the staff of local offices. Still, in order to leave room for innovation, the central office ultimately assesses local offices on whether key outcomes are achieved rather than on the process by which they are achieved.

Key Lessons Learned: Defining and Adhering to the Core Mission

Our case studies shed light on the following lessons about how defining and adhering to the core mission supports scaling. Some of these lessons are drawn from the examples above while others are additional insights gained from other cases not highlighted here.

• Mission clarity and focus are first and foremost the responsibility of the governing body and staff leadership. While everyone formally affiliated with the organization, including staff at all levels, must clearly understand and remain focused on the mission, decisions that could lead to mission drift or dilution reside with the governance and leadership structures. Strategic planning, evaluation, and associated tools such as a theory of change or logic model support mission clarification and articulation.

• Saying “No” can be the most strategic decision. Assessing alignment of opportunities with the mission is critical. When funding is directly attached, potential new opportunities can be powerfully seductive. Turning down any and all opportunities that do not advance the organization’s mission is the most strategic decision. Scaling, after all, is ultimately about expanding impact, not organizational size.

• With the mission as the guidepost, strategies for its achievement can be adapted based on new information, settings, populations, or other changes in context. When making adjustments to strategy in the scaling process, social entrepreneurs in this study recommend also paying attention to how new or modified strategies fit within the organizational culture and incorporate proven-effective elements of the core model.

Defining this scaling capacity and how it supports scaling

For all of the social entrepreneurship efforts we studied, crystal clarity and sharp focus on the mission supported successful scaling. A clearly defined mission provides an organization with purpose and direction. It is the central focus for decision-making and deployment of resources. No matter how broad or narrow the mission is, it must be clearly expressed, so that stakeholders—everyone from board and staff to clients and the press—can easily understand it.

Defining and adhering to the mission is especially important during scaling because the process involves great change. A clear and relevant articulation of the mission helps ensure undiluted transfer as the organization spreads to new communities, hires new staff, or develops new alliances.

Social entrepreneurships frequently have many opportunities to take on new projects or venture in new directions. Each new opportunity must be assessed independently; pursuing new challenges can come at the cost of the sharp focus on mission that yielded success in the first place.


Examples of effective practice in defining and adhering to the core mission

The case of Waterkeeper Alliance illustrates the importance of clarity and focus. Waterkeeper Alliance’s goal is to have at least one Waterkeeper in every U.S. state and Canadian province, in addition to other environmentally strategic water bodies throughout the world. The mission is straightforward: to protect water bodies and champion for clean water. “Stay true to your core,” advises Steve Flieschli, Waterkeeper Alliance Executive Director. “We always say ‘water, water, water,’ and try not to get distracted. The Hudson Riverkeeper [the first Waterkeeper] didn’t start out saying they wanted a waterkeeper on every water body in the U.S; they started out saying they wanted to save the Hudson.” The idea spread when citizens in other communities, concerned with their local water bodies, took notice of the effort’s success.

Successful social entrepreneurships often face terrific opportunities: having proven an ability to find solutions to social problems, it is in the nature of the social entrepreneur to look for the next challenge. DonorsChoose provides a web-based platform on which individuals interested in supporting public school children can connect with classrooms that have a particular need. On the DonorsChoose website, teachers post specific projects that are in need of funding. This could be a “Magical Math Center” or a “Big Book Bonanza.” Individual donors search the website by geography, areas of interest, etc. until they find a project they wish to support. After meeting with success, an incredible variety of organizations approached DonorsChoose asking to be included. Most of these organizations, including the New York Police Department, had little relationship with public education. Saying “No” was critical; complying would have made their fulfillment operation much more complicated, to the point of limiting their ability to scale to new regions. It also would have diluted the brand from one focused on education to one that could be associated with a
multitude of causes.

While the mission is sacred, the strategies for achieving it are not necessarily set in stone. The mission of ACCION International is “to give people the tools they need to work their way out of poverty.” As ACCION has grown, it has made increasingly sophisticated financial products available to poor and disenfranchised small business owners. Roy Jacobowitz, ACCION’s Senior Vice President of Resource Development and Communications explains, “If a business model doesn’t work, let’s just change it. I say, pick core results, principles, and ideals, make sure they are right, and stick with them. Every other variable is mutable.” Similarly, Grameen Bank has poverty alleviation as its core mission. While Grameen Bank started by providing credit for the poorest of the poor and landless—mostly women—villagers in Bangladesh, over time it has expanded into new businesses with the advent of new technologies, such as a cellular telephone business. This expansion, however, only occurred because it fit closely with the organization’s poverty-alleviation mission.

For every area of organizational capacity that plays a critical role during the scaling process (such as the organization’s structure), we revealed an associated practice or set of practices (such as balancing control and flexibility in the structural design) in which organizations engaged that fostered effective scaling. Our research led us an important framing concept: understanding areas of organizational capacity that support scaling best occurs within the context of specific scaling-related practices in which successful social entrepreneurships engage. We use the term scaling capacity because each encompasses both an area of organizational capacity and associated scaling practice(s).

The seven critical scaling capacity areas are:

1. MISSION: Defining and Adhering to Core Mission. Clearly defining and adhering to the mission provides focus for decision-making and resource deployment during the scaling process.

2. STRUCTURE: Balancing Control and Flexibility. Scaling, particularly when it entails organizational expansion, places great challenges on organizational and management structures. The challenge is to balance control with flexibility for innovation and impact.

3. MODEL: Codifying What Works. Impact can be scaled more effectively by clearly articulating essential components of the model so that it can be more easily and faithfully replicated.

4. CULTURE: Cultivating and Perpetuating the Culture. For scaling to succeed, organizations must cultivate and perpetuate during the scaling process those aspects of the culture—shared values, behaviors and norms—that are critical for mission achievement.

5. DATA: Collecting and Using Data. The ability to gather and use data can be critical for informing important scaling-related decisions such as establishing needs in new issue or geographic areas, demonstrating the effectiveness of a model, setting priorities, and choosing strategies.

6. RESOURCES: Connecting Fundraising to the Mission. Successfully-scaled social entrepreneurships are able to expand their resource base by viewing fundraising as a way to achieve mission and by finding ways to connect supporters to programmatic work.

7. LEADERSHIP AND GOVERNANCE: Making the Right Decisions for Scaling. Leaders and boards are the agents that initiate and manage the scaling process. Strong leadership and governance means making sure the right decisions are made to foster greater mission achievement during what is often a period of rapid organizational change.


The graphic below provides a framework for understanding relationships among the scaling capacities. At the bottom of the pyramid are foundational building blocks of the organization: the organizational structure, data, and financial resources. These scaling capacities pertain to the nuts-and-bolts functioning of the organization. Above are leadership & governance, the model, and the mission. These scaling capacities provide the vision and strategy for the organization. That culture surrounds the other scaling capacities reflects its omnipresence: an organization’s culture informs and is informed by every aspect of the organization.

The Seven Critical Scaling Capacities



The seven scaling capacities are distinct yet closely interrelated. In planning for capacity-building work, organizations will need to prioritize the scaling capacities that will provide the most leverage at the present moment. The capacity-building priorities will evolve as the organization enters different stages of its scaling process. Codifying the model, for instance, might require a strategic planning process at the beginning of scaling but may only require small tweaks and refinements at a later stage. Balancing control and flexibility in the structure will be an ongoing challenge for organizations as they grow but may require greater control at some moments and greater flexibility at others.

The scaling capacities do not dictate what is needed at a particular moment per se. Rather, they provide general principles that inform an organization’s capacity-building strategy and should be reflected on periodically to define what capacity building is needed now.