Preparing to Scale
When your project is going for growth, how do you know when you’re ready to scale up?
All of Causeway’s programs are intended to help everyday people make impactful things happen for their community. We try to be helpful at every step in the process — from our intake meetings where we first meet someone and their idea, to the Causeway Challenge where we award grants to people who want to pilot a cool idea they have for solving a particular community challenge.
Basically, we are in the business of pushing people to build thoughtful projects that matter. Sometimes that means a one-time event that is exactly what a community needs at a particular point in time. However, sometimes that results in projects that are ready for scaling, i.e. replicating or growing. In Berkeley’s “Big Idea” contest, they define scaling up as “outreaching to a new geographic area or underserved population, or adding additional services to an ongoing project serving the same geographic area described in your original winning proposal.” Some things to consider when thinking about scaling a pilot project:
- Gut check your project. Yes, you love your project. You created it and built it, so you probably think it’s a great one. Be sure to take the opportunity of piloting something to really receive and listen to feedback from people who participated and from those who didn’t. A pilot is a test. Did your project pass the test? Did your project solve the problem at hand? Did it work? How could it have been better? Did it include the people it needed to include? For those who didn’t participate, why didn’t they?
- Your original project better be really dialed in. In order to be ready for replication or expansion, a project and its leader(s) should have a really clear sense of what they do and how they do it. If you’re still figuring out what you’re doing, or how to deliver it, you’re not ready for scale.
- Do you have the funding figured out? Generally speaking, in the business world, you scale an idea that will make money. That’s not always true in the social sector, meaning just because you have excellent execution and a really impactful program isn’t enough. You have to have a way to pay for the work, which means you either have to fund raise or develop a hybrid business model that generates revenue. Either way, you’re going to have to demonstrate impact, which leads to the next point…
- In order to scale, you have to measure your impact. You have to be able to articulate what you’re accomplishing and ideally have actual metrics that can measure what your project accomplishes for the community. Impact metrics can be simple or very complex, but in order to scale a project you must have some sort of impact measuring system in place. Here’s a great article from Stanford Social Innovation Review about how to measure impact in the real world.
Bottom line, a project needs to be well past the idea phase in order to be ready for scaling. You scale ideas that have been tested and refined.
