ICSF becomes Spring Impact

We are Spring Impact. 

Today, the International Centre for Social Franchising (ICSF) becomes ‘Spring Impact’.

Our organisation has come a long way since it was founded in 2011. At that time, I had just emerged from a period of intense research, as part of a fellowship with the Clore Social Leadership Programme, into the potential for applying the principles of commercial franchising to the social sector.

Six years later, I enjoy seeing those principles in action every day, as we have grown to a global team of 20 that has worked with over 120 organisations to help scale their social impact.

Over the years, social franchising has taught us, and continues to teach us, valuable lessons about what it really takes to scale social impact.

For us, social franchising is still one of the most exciting ways to scale social impact – but, having worked with a wide variety of clients, all with their own unique needs, we know it’s not the right model for everyone.

Our new name reflects our renewed commitment to designing bespoke scale models in partnership with our clients, including but not limited to social franchising. We also specialise in other models of replication, be it designing accreditation systems or loose networks, and we wanted our name to reflect this.

Our new branding also reflects who we are as an organisation. Our clients have provided valuable feedback on what they appreciate most about us, highlighting that we are intelligent, thoughtful, collaborative and thorough, while keeping things light-hearted and fun.

Our new look reflects this dynamism, while also making it clear that ultimately, for us, it’s all about scaling impact.

What this means for how we work 

Our rebrand will not affect the way we work with our clients on a day-to-day basis.

But it is accompanied by an exciting new strategy for the next six-year period, which will bring about some valuable developments in our working style from the new year onwards.

While our tried-and-tested five-stage process will remain central to our work, we will seek to ‘go further’, deepening our relationship with our clients, with a focus on increased support during the pilot and implementation phases.

We will also be seeking to facilitate change within the sector as a whole to tackle the structural obstacles to successful scale. This means closer relationships with funders to help them fund for scale.

We have already established some exciting new partnerships with funders, such as our ongoing collaboration with The Health Foundation a UK-based charity that is exploring ways to invest their resources for the efficient and sustainable scaling of innovations within Britain’s National Health Service.

Our new strategy will see us developing more long-term partnerships with funders so that, together, we can create an enabling environment for scaling social impact.

An exciting future

At this exciting moment in Spring Impact’s development, we also celebrate my recent move to our San Francisco office, where I join our team of six, led by our US directors Greg Coussa and Cho Kim, to contribute to building the organisation there. Our UK office will continue to be run, as it has been for the last two years, by UK directors  Martha Paren  and  Joe Kallarackal and I’ll be back visiting regularly. I’d like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has believed in our mission for the first six years of our development. Now as Spring Impact, we look forward to working with you for the next six years and beyond!

If you have any questions or would like to speak to us about any element of your work, please don’t hesitate to be in contact.

All the best,
Dan and the Spring Impact team!


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