Widespread Impact: Scaling Access for All
It’s no secret that our nation’s students are struggling. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores have declined since 2013, and 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The good news is that we know a lot of what works to support students, and many organizations across the country have developed proven, evidence-based solutions to these challenges. The question becomes “how can we ensure that the greatest number of students, from all backgrounds and in all contexts, have access to these interventions?” Traditionally, a strategy many nonprofits have utilized to expand their impact and reach is to establish additional sites in new communities. However, this approach presents significant challenges, particularly at a time when funding is stretched and community needs are rising. Direct replication can be slow, and requires considerable financial investment, staffing, and infrastructure. Additionally, this approach tends to overlook the distinct needs and contexts of communities organizations seek to serve.
Recognizing these limitations, New Profit partnered with Bellwether in 2021 to identify a growing trend in the field of youth-serving organizations that are focusing on increasing their impact through collaboration rather than replication. Together, we published A Pragmatic Playbook for Impact, which defined three types of impact: direct, widespread, and systemic. Since then, we have learned a lot through our work with our grantees, as well as through our Widespread Impact Collaborative (WICo), a community of practice we piloted in 2022-2023. Below are some of our key insights and lessons learned:
- Widespread impact and systems change can – and often do – overlap. We define widespread impact as a methodology for scaling without direct replication which involves one organization (the “provider organization”) sharing a model, in whole or in part, with other organizations (“partner organizations”) to adopt and adapt in response to community context. An organization that employs widespread impact strategies may also be undertaking systems change efforts. For example, the provider organization may find that shifting certain mindsets, policies, resource flows, or other systemic conditions will make it possible for their model to be implemented more effectively by partner organizations. One example of this is Envision Learning Partners (ELP), a division of Envision Education. ELP supports schools and districts in developing high-quality performance assessment systems for students, and also works to influence state policy around how student success is defined. The shifts they have been able to influence at the state level have created the conditions for their widespread impact work to be more welcome and effective.
- To be most effective, widespread impact strategies must prioritize proximity by meaningfully incorporating the input, ideas, assets, and aspirations of partnering organization’s constituents. When provider organizations enable partner organizations to implement their models, a critical component of this is creating the flexibility and space for the partner organizations to adapt the model based on the needs and context of their community. This can take a number of different forms, depending on the type of widespread impact strategy being pursued. Revisiting the spectrum of widespread impact models below, we offer a few examples of ways in which organizations might prioritize proximity as they develop widespread impact strategies:
On the right side of the spectrum above, these strategies are higher depth – meaning that the provider organization is working in tight partnership with partner organizations to implement its model, and lower breadth – meaning that the provider organization is reaching fewer people with these strategies. Within these strategies, prioritizing proximity may mean that the provider organization is consulting to a partner organization on how they might consider adapting their model based on their local community context. This requires the provider organization to be clear about what parts of its model are essential to maintain impact, and what parts of its model can and should be adapted depending on the community within which it is being implemented.
On the left side of the spectrum above, these strategies are higher breadth – meaning that they have the potential to reach a wider audience – and lower depth – meaning that they are “lighter touch”. Because of this, the provider organization has less control over how a partner organization may choose to implement parts of its model. In these cases, prioritizing proximity might look like offering up tools, resources, and ideas for the type of information a partner organization might consider gathering from its community and some guidance around how to process this information and what it could mean for adaptations to the model.
At New Profit, we believe in the power of utilizing a multiracial, intergenerational, and cross-sector coalition (the M.I.C.™) to shift systems. Through this M.I.C. method, no one organization can – or should – tackle a particular challenge by itself. It is critical for organizations to build relationships with a broad range of proximate stakeholders in order to develop solutions that are most impactful.
- When proximity is prioritized, widespread impact strategies have three key, intertwined benefits over traditional models of scaling or replication – efficiency, credibility, and effectiveness.
- Efficiency: While still a prevailing approach to scale, directly replicating an organization’s model by opening new sites is time-consuming and costly. By instead building the capacity of other organizations to implement a program model, an organization can ultimately reach many more constituents much more rapidly and at a lower cost. As Elizabeth Cushing, CEO of Playworks, wrote in a 2023 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “There are 32 million elementary school-age children in the United States. We’ve been growing for more than 25 years and currently count approximately 700,000 children in 1,400 schools in our circle of direct influence. That’s 2% of the kids, making the idea of scale pretty daunting. Clearly, we won’t get there by only doing what we’ve been doing.” Based on this realization, Playworks began pursuing a widespread impact strategy of partnering with other organizations to deliver their model. As Cushing states, “These partners represent the opportunity to support play at thousands more schools reaching millions more children.”
- Credibility: When an organization that has been working in one state or community decides to open a site in a new state or community, that organization often does not possess deep knowledge of that community’s unique context, and may lack trust within the community. An organization may address this by hiring staff from that community or by conducting a listening tour or needs assessment in the new community. But through widespread impact strategies, community-based organizations that have been deeply immersed in their communities–with a long history of serving the unique populations in those locations– can instead be the ones who are implementing the model, while adapting it to fit the local context. This often gives the work more credibility and generates buy-in within the community, ultimately resulting in more students benefiting from the model.
- Effectiveness: When a model that has been effective in one community is then implemented in a new community, it may or may not have the same level of impact. But when a local organization partners with a provider organization to deliver a solution, it is often because the local organization has knowledge of the community’s needs and assets, and knows how to adapt the model to address those unique needs and assets. A 2024 Stanford Social Innovation Review article refers to this as a “pull” method, where the local community identifies a need and draws in a solution, versus the “push” method sometimes seen in direct replication where organizations push into new communities and deliver their model. Building on the points above, widespread impact strategies are more likely to result in the model being appropriately adapted and therefore more effectively implemented in a new community. Calculus Roundtable, an organization based in the Bay Area, is working to accelerate math and science skills for students of color. Through their Diversity in STEM Fellowship program, they recruit college students majoring in STEM fields to mentor and coach K-12 students. Recognizing the need for their Fellows to receive training on how to be effective, student-centered mentors, Calculus Roundtable partnered with InsideTrack, a provider of coaching solutions, to deliver this training. As a result, the Diversity in STEM Fellows are now better equipped to have meaningful conversations with students to ensure they feel heard and valued.
- When implementing widespread impact strategies, it is critical to think beyond fidelity and focus instead on integrity. As part of the Widespread Impact Collaborative (WICo) work, we partnered with Transcend, who delivered content aimed at helping the WICo organizations explore this. In traditional nonprofit lingo, when an organization begins scaling, there is often a lot of talk about how the organization is going to “maintain fidelity to the model”. In other words, how will they control whether their new sites are “perfectly” implementing their model as originally conceived? When developing widespread impact strategies, it is more appropriate to focus on maintaining the integrity of the model rather than exact fidelity. In other words, is the model being implemented with the core tenets in mind? Are the overall principles being maintained? Transcend’s session aimed to help our WICo organizations determine which elements of their models need to remain “tight” – that is, they must be maintained in order to ensure impact, and which elements of their model should be “loose” – that is, they should be adapted depending on the local community context. Through this exercise, organizations were able to shift their mindsets from fidelity to integrity. As Playworks CEO Elizabeth Cushing states, it’s important to “clarify internally the elements that are essential to achieving the desired outcomes, as opposed to those that are ‘good to have.’ We love everything that is part of Playworks’ approach to safe and healthy play, but to unleash others to implement it, we had to narrow it down to the critical pieces.”
Through our experience piloting our Widespread Impact Collaborative, we have been able to dive deeply into the widespread impact strategies of a couple of organizations. InsideTrack has been executing its widespread impact strategy for years, and has been very intentional about fostering the necessary mindset change amongst its staff as they have built out their three-pronged impact model. OneGoal has spent the last few years building out their widespread impact strategy and has several lessons to share on their process so far.
What these two organizations – as well as many others in New Profit’s portfolio – share is a recognition that the traditional replication model of scaling is not the only path. When organizations “live the M.I.C.” and take a truly multiracial, intergenerational, cross-sectoral approach to spreading their impact, the outcome is often more effective, credible, and efficient impact, for a far greater number of people.
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About New Profit
New Profit is a venture philanthropy organization that catalyzes the impact of social entrepreneurs who are expanding access and opportunity in America. We provide capital, capacity, and community to a portfolio of organizations to increase their impact, scale, and sustainability. And we partner with social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and cross-sector leaders to shift how the philanthropic sector pursues social change and ensures that all people can thrive. Since 1998, New Profit has invested over $350M in 275+ high-impact organizations serving more than 30 million people in all 50 states.