FAQs
What do you mean by scale?
Most people hear “scaling” and think of more staff, more offices, more budget, more resources. That’s growth.
Scale is different. It’s when your impact expands faster than the resources needed to sustain it. It’s about closing the gap between what your solution currently achieves and the size of the problem itself.
This can be achieved in two ways:
- Reaching more people directly with your service or intervention, in a way that’s both operationally and financially sustainable, not dependent on you being in the room for every child and family it reaches.
- Changing the systems and conditions that allow the problem to exist in the first place, shifting the policy, practice, and behaviour that determine whether prevention reaches everyone who needs it.
How do you define prevention?
We consider prevention as any programme, service or intervention that is working to stop or lessen the likelihood of childhood sexual violence from occuring. This could include upstream prevention activities such as parental education or challenging gender norms.
Examples include, but are not limited to: school-based education programmes, gender norms and stereotypes interventions, services for perpetrators, community mobilisation activities to change attitudes and behaviours, parent training programmes, ensuring safe online environments for children, preventing peer victimisation and more.
What does the Expert Consultancy actually involve?
Our scale experts will join forces with your team, bringing experience from supporting over 300 organisations on their scale journeys. They provide the scale knowledge, extra capacity, structure, and clarity that helps you move towards your ambitions.
In practice, support typically includes:
- A deep dive into your operations and context to inform your scale plans.
- Workshops with leadership and the wider team to co-create a robust scale strategy and design your scale model.
- Facilitating alignment between stakeholders, so there’s clarity, ownership, and momentum across the team.
- Support to run lean testing that de-risks and validates your strategy.
- Reports and financial models you can use for fundraising, partner recruitment, and rolling out your plans.
This runs through a mix of in-person and online workshops and check-ins, typically in sprints of around six months that start with a field visit so your team and our scale expert can get to know each other before diving in.
What level of evidence or impact do I need to apply?
In order to be ready to scale, your solution, intervention or service should have strong evidence for its outcomes, so it can prove that it’s making a difference and gain buy-in from potential partners. The level of evidence required will differ based on the type of solution you are delivering. Spring Impact looks for clear qualitative and quantitative evidence of outcomes and a robust monitoring and evaluation process. The strongest forms of evidence are external or independent evaluations but we do not expect every solution to have this in place.
What matters most is that your evidence is grounded in reality, current, and suited to the case you are making to the funders and partners whose support you need. Iterative, implementation-based evidence can be just as persuasive to the partners that matter most. This might include qualitative case studies demonstrating change over time, or data showing how your model has been refined through delivery and continues to work across different sites or contexts.
If there is a significant lack of evidence for your outcomes and impact, resources may be better invested in developing this first before embarking on a scaling journey.
What types of advocacy do you support to scale?
We support organisations working to scale advocacy approaches that aim to prevent childhood sexual violence, this might include organisations seeking to influence policy, change systems, or shift norms at a broader level.
Our support is focused on helping organisations think strategically about advocacy in service of scale, rather than detailed campaign design. This could include developing a clear scale-led theory of change for advocacy work, strengthening organisational capacity and focus to deliver on ambitions, or thinking through how to extend their advocacy approach or model to new locations and contexts.
