One component of the Scaling Pathways series is Scaling Snapshots, which are glimpses into one organization’s scaling journey, including the strategies pursued, implications of those strategies and “Pearls of Scaling Wisdom” to share more broadly with other social ventures. Below are a sample of some of these pearls of wisdom from Skoll Awardee organizations Living Goods, Fundación Capital, One Acre Fund, and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP).
Living Goods, a social enterprise that created a model to train and motivate community health workers, gained the following insights while in pursuit of its goal to improve the health and wealth of 50 million people by 2025:
“As you scale with other partners and in different contexts, you will need to be flexible on many aspects of your approach. Therefore, it is critical that you, as an organization, understand the key elements that drive your impact—and that you protect those elements as you scale. Once you’ve established these non-negotiables, be open to adapt and learn from the experience of other partners on all other pieces. For Living Goods, our non-negotiables are ensuring that CHWs are digitally-enabled, are paid (ideally, linked to their performance), and have access to medicines. But, when it comes to decisions around selling products to supplement their incomes, we are more flexible.”
See the entire Living Goods Scaling Snapshot
Fundación Capital, a social enterprise that works with public and private sector organizations to provide effective financial services to help people get out and stay out of poverty, learned the following best practices while working to scale its model:
“Our ‘secret to success’ is co-creation. We don’t design in a vacuum or come with ready-made solutions. Instead, our role is to drive co-creation, which requires us to manage the “build-measure-learn” agile development process together with partners. Our solutions are most effective when they leverage partners’ existing networks and scaffolding and lean into their priorities, helping them see how the solution fits well within their standing investments. Co-creation drives ownership and capacity, builds trust, and generates efficiencies by embedding solutions into existing systems.”
See the entire Fundación Capital Scaling Snapshot
One Acre Fund, a social enterprise that uses a market-driven approach to increase the income and livelihood of smallholder farmers, shared the following lessons it learned while working towards its goal of changing the lives of four million smallholder farm families by 2030:
“Early in our founding, we established an audacious goal: to serve one million farmers by 2020, helping them to dramatically increase their income. While we had a solution that we were testing, we framed our scaling goals around the problem—not around the particular solution or our organization. This bold vision drove the refinement of our core model—our eventual partnership and advocacy work—and helped us remain focused on the scale and urgency of the problem that we wanted to address.”
See the entire One Acre Fund Scaling Snapshot
Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), a social enterprise that blends private and public sector approaches to improve service delivery offerings to low-income consumers, had the following advice for other organizations that are looking to scale their impact:
“Creating a hybrid structure is a big investment of time and resources so should not be a decision made lightly or made with only revenue goals in mind. In our case, a hybrid structure allowed us to leverage our existing work, develop new business lines, and achieve more impact and reach. In order to reach those goals, we took on additional risks and spent time and resources carefully implementing the model. For example, we needed to ensure cultural alignment between our nonprofit and for-profit staff, which we accomplished in part by sharing office space and creating and managing a shared culture and values. We also created governance structures to manage the unique needs of each business while sharing learnings (e.g., the entities have separate boards to ensure advising unique to each business, and WSUP’s CEO sits on WSUP Advisory’s Board).”
See the entire WSUP Scaling Snapshot
Explore additional Scaling Pearls of Wisdom from each of these Skoll Awardee organizations in this comprehensive PDF.
