Towards a Redefinition of Scale
Scale. It certainly was a buzz word in the nonprofit sector for 2010. At VPP, we talk a lot about scale: Helping our investment partners scale to serve more children and youth of low-income families, scaling across jurisdictions to better serve shifting demographics, and, most recently, scaling our youthCONNECT network to comprehensively address the multi-faceted barriers to success for young adults in the National Capital Region.
But for the New Year, I would like to join the growing chorus of those who are pushing back on measuring scale exclusively through outputs and are instead encouraging an expanded definition of scale based on an ultimate increase in effectiveness and outcomes. Obviously, increasing the number of individuals served—whether that is through workforce development programs, after school classes, or college tutoring—creates a tremendous benefit for the individuals served and for a region. But interpreting scale exclusively as increasing the number of people served can constrain and limit a nonprofit’s goals and strategies and miss some important elements of creating lasting change in a community.
In addition to increasing outputs from an individual organization, another pathway to significantly increasing results is through scaling up a network of organizations working towards common outcomes, similar to what Strive in Cincinnati has done and what VPP is attempting to do with youthCONNECT. I wrote about the importance of a networked approach to social change in my column last April. One other way to approach scale, which I want to focus on in this column, is through seeking to influence and change the broader system in which an organization works.
This type of scale ultimately has the same goal as increasing the number of people served, but approaches creating lasting effect in a different way. Instead of delivering services, scaling through influence can take many different forms. Jeffrey Bradach, co-founder of Bridgespan, wrote an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review that details the different ways organizations can scale their effect without having to increase the size of their organization, or the number of services they provide. These ranged from developing a web-based platform to increase supporters—like KaBOOM! did—to using advocacy in tandem with your services—like City Year does. VPP has encouraged and implemented many of these strategies with its investment partners while also looking for ways to scale up the services provided.
These strategies can have a profound overall effect. Often, funders will focus simply on tangible results: How many children received their vaccinations by age two? How many teenagers graduated from high school on time? How many are on track to enroll in a four-year college? These are important indicators of progress, but miss the more difficult to measure efforts to create deeper, systemic change. A Bradach describes in his article, the contributions of City Year’s advocacy efforts to make service a priority in this country is as important as the number of volunteers it directly supports. Those efforts produced many results, including helping form the Corporation for National and Community Service. This “scale by influence” has multiplier effects beyond the communities and regions an organization directly touches.
VPP sees and encourages these types of scale in many of our investment partnerships. The most recent example of scaling through influence has been our partnership with Year Up, National Capital Region (NCR), a local site of the national workforce development organization that places at-risk youth in internships to help them gain work experience. We completed our first annual review of the investment and are very pleased with the progress and accomplishments to date. Year Up NCR has made some significant strides increasing the number of youth served, but the most notable accomplishments have been made in other areas of the investment.
Year Up ‘s five-year strategy includes the following goals:
- Fundamentally change the lives of over 1,000 local young adults who are employed in high potential, living wage positions;
- Demonstrate a nationally relevant partnership model with community colleges that strengthens the pipeline of low income young adults from high school to college and/or to work;
- Significantly influence the behavior and priorities of the federal government on issues of education and employment for young adults;
Only one of these goals is about scale through outputs. The second and third goals will benefit not only Year Up NCR, and Year Up sites in other locations, but have the potential to change the game for all of those who are working to help young people increase their education and employment outcomes.
Although it will be more difficult to ultimately quantify the benefits achieved through those goals, we are able to track early indicators of progress. Year Up NCR has forged strong partnerships with several other organizations in the area, including AOL, Northern Virginia Community College, and Freddie Mac that have the potential to make lasting systemic change on employment opportunities for disconnected youth in the National Capital Region beyond those directly served by Year Up. The success of the Year Up youth in these internships opens the doors to many other youth like them for the future, regardless of their affiliation with the program. These partnerships can also serve as models for other Year Up sites around the country.
Year Up is not the only investment partner with a record of scaling influence. To a certain degree, all of our investment partners have successfully leveraged some aspect of their organization to create a positive effect beyond the number of services they provide. One that stands out, and is quickly becoming a nationally recognized model, is the work at the See Forever Foundation.
Like Year Up NCR, VPP began its investment with the See Forever Foundation, which runs the Maya Angelou Public Charter schools in the District of Columbia, when it was serving a small number of children, around 80 in 2003. By the time the investment period had ended, it was serving significantly more children, around 240. Three years later, that number had jumped to over 500, a testament to the capacity building the organization went through with VPP’s strategic assistance and investment.
But those numbers alone do not illustrate the full effect See Forever is having on its community. More than three years ago, in part because of the solid capacity it had built through VPP’s investment, See Forever was able to compete for and win a contract with the District Youth Rehabilitation Services to operate a school at its new youth correctional facility, New Beginnings. See Forever’s school, the Maya Angelou Academy, began to operate with a focus on the rehabilitation of youth back into society. In just a few years, See Forever has turned around the education program at the facility and been deemed a nationally recognized, “remarkable” program. Standardized tests show that, on average, students at the Maya Angelou Academy are achieving the equivalent of 1.4 years in reading and 1.3 year in math through the program. (For more on See Forever’s work at New Beginnings, read the recent Education Week article on the program.)
In order to add scaling through influence as a strategy for organizations that are focused on scaling outputs and outcomes, nonprofit leaders should ask themselves the following questions:
- Do I have a complete and accurate picture of the landscape and ecosystem in which my organizations operates?
- Do I have an overarching vision for the change I am trying to achieve beyond my organization’s programmatic goals and immediate mission?
- Have I identified the leverage points that my organization is uniquely positioned to effect?
- Do I have the right staff for the job and the board members I need to implement an influence strategy?
- Have I demonstrated the effectiveness of my own service model in a measurable and compelling way?
- Am I willing to put significant resources into making systemic change for which my organization may or may not get direct credit?
- Does my organization have the patience and flexibility to go down a path that rarely yields direct and immediate results?
Advocacy and influence is not a new tool for nonprofits by any means, and is obviously not appropriate for all organizations, particularly in early stages of growth. But in all the conversations about expansion and replication, some of the social sector’s most powerful means to long-lasting change are often overlooked. Scale in numbers will ameliorate the lives of many, but leave the root causes of issues unchanged. We see the greatest social return when expansion is coupled with strategic and effective influence strategies. It’s not easy to measure and may not show the instantaneous effects many donors and funders look for, but if we are committed to ultimate systemic change, we must pursue every path to get there.
-Carol Thompson Cole
