The Nonprofit World Is Obsessed With Scaling. But Is It Always the Right Choice?

“Scale.” “Scaling.” “Scaled.” If you work in philanthropy or an adjacent field, there’s a good chance you used one of those words in the past few days — if not the past few minutes. It might be in your organization’s mission statement and likely appears in countless grant applications.

So it’s worth considering what we actually mean when we use the word — and whether scaling is always, by definition, a good thing.

The idea behind scaling is that donors who want to have the most impact need to invest large sums to expand successful programs. According to this thinking, if that successful community health program in Boise, Idaho, is scaled, millions more people across the country will benefit.

Given the multitude of challenges facing the nation and the planet, it’s certainly laudable that philanthropists such as MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates are pouring billions into rapidly scaling innovative efforts to address racial and gender inequity, solve hunger, or combat climate change. Many in the field understandably want to follow their lead.

What’s more, a new report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy on Scott’s giving rebuffs the notion that her strategy is overburdening nonprofits who aren’t prepared to scale their work.

But that doesn’t mean scaling should be the ultimate goal for all grantees or that it doesn’t require careful planning to succeed. Here’s why.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Simply stated, a solution that works in one city may be completely incompatible with the challenges facing another community. Geography matters, environment matters, leadership matters, as do people’s lived experiences and needs.

I’ve seen this up-close in my work leading the Washington Center, which connects college students with internships and work-force development programs across the country and internationally. To serve students from different areas, as well as employers with specific regional and industry needs, our program has become more customized rather than scaled.

We’ve discovered that programs that work in a city may not be effective in rural areas where broadband access and public transportation, among other things, are often limited. Employment opportunities, infrastructure, and cost of living also differ greatly — sometimes even within a single state.

In Wilmington, N.C., for example, where the film and entertainment industries are booming, we’ve found that students need different training and skill development than students in Charlotte, one of the nation’s hottest and most diverse job markets.

Our lives would be easier if we presumed that student needs and circumstances could all be met with a cookie-cutter program or that all employers need staff with similar educational background and skills. Yet we’ve learned to adapt programs to different circumstances, such as offering virtual, hybrid, and in-person internship, skills training, and networking options, during different lengths of time — semester-long, weeklong, and bootcamp weekends. This ensures accessibility for students of all backgrounds and provides employers with the range of skills they need.

Most Nonprofits Can’t Scale Quickly

All nonprofits have a vision and aspiration to reach as many people as possible to have the greatest impact. However, most lack the technology, operational infrastructure, project management tools, and staff to scale from a modest regional effort to a national one. They almost always need time to put all of the pieces into place.

Nonprofits looking to significantly scale their work should first invest in leadership training and strategic planning focused on how to expand programs effectively. That means donors need to make such training a priority for grantees by generously funding professional development efforts. MacKenzie Scott, for example, includes general operating support for training and infrastructure needs as part of her mega-gifts.

One of the best models I’ve seen for ensuring effective pre-scale planning and training is the strategic planning grants program offered by the Delta Regional Authority, a joint federal-state collaboration to promote economic development in the lower Mississippi River region and Alabama. The program provides grantees with initial funds to explore their goals, potential partners, resources needed, and more before beginning the scaling process.

What a given organization will need to build its capacity for scaling is unlikely to follow a predetermined formula. If an organization is scrappy and light on staffing and infrastructure, scaling will require creating new positions and internal structures, beefing up technology, improving assessment and evaluation tools, and making a range of other operational changes.

Leadership Matters

Those leading a scaling effort not only need to have a deep understanding of the challenges facing the region they serve but they also should be comfortable working with different partners who can help facilitate successful expansion, including public service providers, elected officials, and the business community.

That may require bringing in a leader who has demonstrated abilities in those areas. At the very least, the founder of a small nonprofit start-up may need training and mentoring in areas such as organizational change management and using data to make better decisions about what’s needed to effectively expand a program.

“Too often, the question is: We serve 200 in our program now; can we serve 2,000?” says Judith Spitz, CEO of Break Through Tech, which creates opportunities for tech careers for women and nonbinary college students.

Instead, she says, nonprofit leaders should ask themselves “what breaks” if they want to scale from 200 to 2,000? “What no longer works in a program with this growth? Scaling doesn’t happen by just doing more of what you are doing. More often than not, you have to design something new — something that was designed for scale.”

Following a generous philanthropic infusion in 2018 from Pivotal Ventures, founded by French Gates, Spitz has been rapidly scaling Break Through Tech across the nation, a process that has meant regularly challenging her own assumptions about the program’s structure and value. “Scaling requires rapid-fire re-engineering, assessing, and intense listening of leaders on the ground of what will work and what won’t in different geographies,” says Spitz. “You have to trust you’ve hired the right local leaders and empower their decision-making for results in each community.”

While Pivotal Ventures has trusted Break Through Tech to make its own decisions about how best to scale, it hasn’t been entirely hands-off, either. The project team at Pivotal meets with Spitz every other week to talk strategy, solve problems, discuss growth, and review metrics, a process that has helped the organization grow from serving 580 students in 2018 to 5,200 today.

Certainly, we should all celebrate the commitment by many philanthropists and foundations to fund innovative projects at scale. But scaling without the necessary planning, infrastructure, and leadership could result in large investments that do not deliver meaningful results or have a lasting impact, potentially jeopardizing future investment in many other worthy programs.