2019 Scale Accelerator
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Social Impact at Scale
Scale Accelerator will provide four cohorts of non-profits and social enterprises, drawn from all over the UK, with intensive support to scale their impact. In addition, Spring Impact will be supporting innovative funders to learn what really works in supporting organisations to scale, and how they can embed these practices within their organisations.
The programme has been made possible by the Big Lottery Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players.
Joe Kallarackal Spring Impact Director said, “We know that we have fantastic organisations across the UK with incredibly impactful projects supporting our communities. Many desire to increase their impact, but need support to explore how to make this a reality. Whilst there are a range of resources focused on supporting innovation, developing new ideas, or assisting organisational growth, Spring Impact’s Scale Accelerator is uniquely focused on scaling social impact.
Not only are we excited about the potential to accelerate each participants’ impact, but also the opportunity to engage funders on how they can change their own practices to support scaling impact.”
Participating organisations will receive 9 months of consultancy support to define a clear plan for scaling their impact sustainably alongside access to expertise to tackle their biggest barriers to scale.
Derek Bardowell, Senior Head of UK Portfolio at the Big Lottery Fund, said: “We’re delighted that National Lottery funding is supporting this programme, which helps organisations to grow and increase their impact. Ambitious projects across the UK will be able to scale up their effects, enabling more people and communities to thrive.”
If you’re interested in taking part or know an organisation with a great proven social innovation click here to register your interest.
For more information about Spring Impact and how they help nonprofits and social enterprises scale up their social impact please contact [email protected].
Notes to Editor
About the Big Lottery Fund:
The NHS is under constant pressure to find solutions that have the potential to improve health care outcomes or deliver cost savings at scale. This has become even more apparent to me over the past few months as I’ve explored scaling up in the UK health care sector more closely. Spring Impact has been travelling across the country to meet with project teams that have been supported by the Health Foundation.
We’ve seen inspirational clinicians and managers who go above and beyond every day, to invest in improvement and innovation solutions to boost health care outcomes. The landscape of possible solutions is diverse, ranging from delivering multi-disciplinary support to advanced symptom Parkinson’s patients, to preventing prescribing errors in GP practices. But too often these solutions exist as isolated pockets of excellence and are infrequently implemented at wider scale locally or nationally.
As we explored the specific challenges of replication within the UK health care sector we found that a popular way to ‘scale up’ an approach or intervention to improve patient care is through sharing best practice. SPRING IMPACT calls this activity ‘dissemination’. It can work excellently for particular solutions or contexts, for example clinical networks – where clinicians share best practice and ideas for making small scale changes to practice. But for other approaches and interventions, particularly those that are more complex, dissemination alone can be insufficient.
To begin to understand why dissemination only works for some solutions or contexts, we listened and we learned through available literature and interviews with people working in the health care sector. We heard time and again about the challenges associated with dissemination – that more support was needed to create behaviour change, or that there was a lack of clarity about the approach or intervention being scaled up.
We believe more structured ways of replication such as social franchising or licensing have particular potential to help scale solutions across the NHS. Social franchising is based upon the commercial franchising model where companies, such as the Body Shop, use franchises to expand. Our chief executive Dan Berelowitz spent time with The Body Shop, McDonald’s and some great social enterprises, understanding what makes replication and franchising work. In this model a proven business model is ‘boxed’ up and passed on to others to replicate with appropriate support. Social franchising follows the same principle, allowing an organisation to package what works and provide support to others to adopt it, with a focus on replicating impact. This retains the essence and fidelity of the core elements of the approach, while remaining flexible and open to adaptation to the local context.
It is this model that we recommended to NSPCC for scaling their Baby Steps programme, with the charity transitioning from being the direct provider of the service, to acting as a franchisor overseeing implementation by local mainstream organisations such as Children’s Centres and also by midwifery teams. We believe this model enables NSPCC to ensure fidelity to the evidence-based model, whilst enabling local ownership.
One of the project teams we met with to explore these replication models was the team responsible for IRIS (Identification & Referral to Improve Safety), a general practice-based domestic violence training, support and referral programme for primary care staff. Since beginning the research trial in 2007 to becoming a commissionable model in 2010, IRIS has been commissioned across the UK, leading to increased identification and referrals for victims of domestic violence. Having successfully scaled to date by responding to requests for their service, the IRIS project team is now at a point in their scale journey where the team wants to be more proactive in its replication approach.
We worked with the IRIS team to discuss what they felt was working well with their current network and any areas for improvement. Together we considered the type of relationship the central IRIS team need with those delivering IRIS locally, so they are able to be effective and achieve the desired level of impact. This included exploring what they considered to be the core requirements for delivering the IRIS programme at local sites and how they can best quality assure and support local teams.
The team is now working to convert their current replication system to a social franchise, developing the details of their required relationship with teams delivering the IRIS programme and the legal agreements which will form the basis of these relationships. Ultimately, the team hopes this more structured approach to replication will allow them to effectively support teams in new areas to adopt the IRIS model. The IRIS social enterprise was incorporated in February 2017.