Social Impact at Scale

Strategy

Choosing a scale pathway

From replication to building a movement - explore different pathways to scaling impact

What will this tool help me do?

Scaling is all about increasing your impact to better meet the size of the social need. But there are lots of ways to do this. We think of ‘pathways to scale’ as different approaches you can take to either scale up solutions, or to change systems, cultures and society.

The purpose of this tool is not to choose one pathway. It’s to explore the pros and cons of different pathways, so you can be clear on the reasons why you choose one pathway (or a combination of pathways) over another, the benefits that you’re trying to unlock, and the tradeoffs you’d be willing to make.

STEP-BY-STEP

To work on the guide, follow these steps:

Make a copy to your own Google Drive folder: Click file > Make a copy > Entire presentation > Select your personal drive folder, OR
Download a copy to your desktop: Click file > Download > Microsoft Word (or other file type)

Open the guide

Step 1

Pick 3 pathways from the ‘Scale Pathways Guide‘ to focus on. Choose a mix of pathways. Maybe one that you really like, one that you’re not sure about and one that you don’t think would work.

Step 2

To work on the worksheet, copy it to your own Google Drive folder or download it to your desktop.

Now imagine you are scaling using each of the pathways. Complete the worksheet with the benefits and trade-offs of each pathway you have chosen. Some other helpful questions to consider are:

How much control would it give you over the solution?
How would it work, given the solution’s complexity?
How expensive would it be?
How quickly could you scale through this method?

Step 3

Take a step back and consider:

What stands out as your preferred pathway?
What would be the implications or consequences of this choice?
What what are the benefits of your preferred pathway?
What are the tradeoffs? How would you mitigate for these?

Team buy-in is critical to the success of any scaling efforts. As a step, you will want to present your ideas for the most suitable scale pathway to your team, stakeholders and constituents to get feedback and build buy-in.

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