Nonprofits and their philanthropic backers have gotten good in recent years at developing programs that can make a difference in solving serious social programs. Yet even the most successful programs only scratch the surface of real need. So now the big question is this: How can we take what we know about what works and spread it so broadly that we don’t just make a dent in solving problems but come closer to eliminating them? What we need are programs that can reach what we call a truly “transformative scale.”
Innovative nonprofits and others are devising possible answers to this challenge with at least nine approaches that hold real promise. Here’s a guide to the approaches that focus on increasing the impact of ideas—not the size of organizations.
Rely on existing networks.
Many nonprofits already operate in hundreds, if not thousands, of locations. For example, 60 percent of Americans live within three miles of a YMCA facility. Using its vast network, the Y is working to rapidly spread a program developed by the National Institutes of Health that helps to prevent diabetes. By altering participants’ eating and exercise habits, the program has been shown to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent in individuals at risk of the disease. The original NIH approach relied on doctors, nurses, and others to work one on one with that population, but it was so costly that the idea couldn’t take hold.
The Y adapted the program using trained local instructors. It now achieves the same impressive results at one-fourth the cost, which enabled the Y to persuade health insurers to reimburse program costs. That, in turn, cleared the way for the Y to expand the program to 614 locations, with many more to come.
Recruit and train others to deliver the solution.
It’s possible to teach a collection of unrelated organizations to deliver a successful program to large numbers of beneficiaries. Year Up, which provides professional skills development and training for disadvantaged urban young people who are out of work and out of school, chose this route in 2012, working with Miami Dade College.
The college is testing a program, the Professional Training Corps, that provides students pursuing an associate degree with professional development and internship experience that mirrors the Year Up program. If the pilot program works, community colleges across the country will be able to adapt the idea and reach a projected 100,000 students a year.
Spread ideas that work, not entire programs.
By identifying the essential components of a successful program that account for most of the impact, it’s possible to break them out and get nearly the same results at a lower cost. KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, which runs charter schools, has taken this approach with leadership training because it believes that outstanding schools are built and sustained by great leaders.
Two years ago, KIPP launched the Leadership Design Fellowship, an eight-month program for public and charter-school district administrators that provides intensive training based on how KIPP develops strong principals. The idea behind the program is that its graduates—some of whom lead districts with hundreds of thousands of students—will adopt KIPP’s principal-training approach in their own school systems, thus greatly expanding KIPP’s impact without adding significantly to its size.
Use technology to reach a larger audience.
Technology can provide a lower-cost way of extending a program’s reach and impact, the approach adopted by College Summit. The nonprofit seeks to increase college enrollment and success rates among low-income high-school graduates. Recently, it used a $2.5-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop 20 Facebook apps that can help guide thousands more low-income students through the college-admission process and support their success on campus. Time will tell whether this experiment succeeds.
Don’t just build organizations and programs; strengthen an entire field.
Nonprofits, foundations, and other donors committed to far-reaching social change understand that their goals cannot be reached without the support of a critical mass of organizations and individuals working together as a “field.” One promising way to help advance a field involves leadership development. In elementary and secondary education, for example, organizations like New Leaders for New Schools; the Broad Superintendents Academy; TNTP, formerly known as the New Teachers Project; Teach for America; and the Center for Inspired Teaching have produced a wave of leadership talent that has helped shape the movement to improve education. A note of caution: Field-building investments take a long time to play out, and their effectiveness can be difficult to assess.
Change public systems.
Governments run large-scale programs that reach a lot of people, but too often these programs achieve disappointing results. Hence, improving government programs holds promise for delivering widespread benefits. That’s why the Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, is seeking to improve how the juvenile system works. Over the past 20 years, the grant maker has invested more than $100-million to push for changes in how state and local officials determine whether to send a troubled young person to jail, to a detention facility, or to home-based rehabilitation. It conducted rigorous research that demonstrates it’s best to keep a young person at home and used that argument to help 39 states establish 200 programs based on that approach.
Embrace the need for policy change.
An act of Congress can dramatically increase the reach of a successful program, as exemplified by the Nurse-Family Partnership. It serves 26,000 low-income, first-time mothers in 43 states by sending a registered nurse to visit their homes regularly for the first two years of a child’s life.
The program has been shown to provide $5.70 in benefits for every dollar spent. In 2010, Congress established the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and committed $1.5-billion over five years so that Nurse-Family Partnership and other groups that use similar approaches can expand their operations to help more families.
Don’t ignore for-profit approaches.
Sometimes nonprofits and philanthropists can play a critical role in showing for-profits the viability of a new market or business. Microfinance is the classic example. The concept started out as a project run by nonprofits and government agencies. Over time, commercial entities—and eventually the enormous for-profit capital markets—became convinced that microfinance was a viable business model and invested heavily to expand it.
Alter people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
Improving society often requires altering the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of many people so that the change becomes the new social norm.
Nonprofits that persuade people to kick smoking or quit texting while driving have developed social marketing and grassroots-organizing tools that provide lessons for many nonprofits.
Many of the issues that the social-change sector cares most about affecting are rooted in behavioral choices that may be subject to similar changes.
Taking what works on a relatively small scale and spreading it on a large, transformative scale using these nine approaches—and others—will be the defining challenge of nonprofits and donors in the coming decade. The hard work of figuring out how to do that has only begun.
Jeffrey Bradach is co-founder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group. Abe Grindle is a consultant in Bridgespan’s Boston office.