Last week, we shared a Business-to-Impact glossary to help translate ideas and terminology from the world of business into nonprofit contexts, with care and ethical consideration. We mentioned concepts like cost per unit and economies of scale.
This week, we want to show how those ideas come to life and how they can drive impact at scale.
Earlier this year, Precision Development (PxD) published one of the most thoughtful and transparent reflections we’ve seen on prioritising impact before growth.
The story
Founded in 2016, PxD had the bold goal of improving the lives of 100 million people. In that year they reached just under 30,000 farmers. So to achieve their goal (and importantly their mission) they decided to focus on these three things:
- Designing for low cost per user
- Building programmes others can run
- Staying committed to impact, not solutions
The result (so far)
- Their cost per user (farmer) dropped from over $40 in 2016 to under $1 in 2024
- The services they built now scale without them, run by local governments
- They have reached over 18.5 million farmers
“It’s about falling in love with the problem and holding our solutions lightly.”
— Spring Impact, as quoted by PxD
PxD’s chart showing the sharp drop in cost and increase in farmers reached (users) from 2016 to 2024.
Here’s what they did and what you can take from it
1. Design for economies of scale
PxD prioritised delivery models with near-zero marginal cost. They used digital solutions primarily, and once the infrastructure was in place, each new user cost almost nothing to reach.
“These economies of scale have allowed us to exponentially increase our impact… with only incremental increases in resources.”
2. Partner with doers at scale
Instead of delivering services forever, PxD uses a Build–Operate–Transfer model. They design and run services temporarily, then hand them over to governments, who now run them independently. More than 7 million farmers benefit from PxD-designed services without PxD’s ongoing involvement or philanthropic funding.
3. Organisational contraction ≠ failure
Contraction doesn’t mean failure. In fact, it can be a signal of real success. When their programmes in India and Pakistan transitioned to local authorities, PxD closed offices, reduced staff, and their budget shrank from $8M to under $5M. This was their strategy → a commitment to transferring large-scale programmes to governments.
4. Focus on your mission, not your solution
This can feel hard at first, but it’s an important step towards meaningful impact. PxD are solution-agnostic. While their tools are often digital, they regularly experiment with new approaches – like weather forecasting systems, stress-tolerant seeds, and climate technologies – that meaningfully improve the lives of farmers. This is what holding your solution lightly, and falling in love with (fixing) the problem means, in action.
“We don’t focus solely on digital agriculture… Our guiding principle is to prioritise solutions that can reach large numbers of people at very low (or even zero) marginal cost.”
5. Help improve existing services and models
Another key to PxD’s success is how they refine what already exists. Their goal isn’t to make a single solution work, but to work with governments and other nonprofits to make existing services more effective. They do this by embedding research, running A/B tests, improving user experience, and updating information in real time making the existing solutions more valuable for the people they serve.
Another key to PxD’s success is how they refine what already exists. Their goal isn’t to make a single solution work, but to work with governments and other nonprofits to make existing services more effective. They do this by embedding research, running A/B tests, improving user experience, and updating information in real time making the existing solutions more valuable for the people they serve.
Read the full piece here 👉 Impact at Scale: Why Growth Isn’t Always the Answer
