Stop wasting scarce funding: replicate don’t reinvent
How do you do more with less? As times get tough this simple question gets more and more important for social sector leaders.
We are all looking for ways to increase our impact without necessitating a £3 million grant. I personally started getting frustrated at the challenges of increasing impact about two years ago when running a NGO working in the livelihoods and microcredit space in Ghana and Northern India. My frustration was scale. I saw many successful, well evaluated programmes that remain small. Many of these models are truly addressing a local need but help 100 people rather than the 100,000 or more they would need to really address the scale of the issue.
The other frustration was reinvention of the wheel. Social entrepreneurs and even larger organisations start new projects to address social needs rather than properly researching what has gone before, learning from it and designing for scale. This is compounded by the fact that funders generally prefer funding ‘new’ ideas which means that social organisations are obliged to ‘innovate’ to get funds even when there are proven methods that work.
It was on the Clore Social Leadership Programme that I was struck by organisations such as Foodbank, School for Social Entrepreneurs and Chance UK who have so successfully replicated their work around the UK while maintaining quality. As Bill Clinton said:
“Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up”.
This is why I was drawn to the idea of social franchising. Its power is that a proven social change project is turned into a ‘franchise’ and then quickly replicated. Highly successful commercial franchising is seen all over the world: Body Shop, Subway or McDonalds. The central franchise documents processes and then franchisees adopt the approach and are given support in establishing themselves. This allows them to set up a successful business much faster, with reduced risk, whilst maintaining quality. The critical difference with social franchising is that rather than creating profits for shareholders the aim is to create benefits to society.
Not everyone can be an innovator, but there are many people willing to work hard to create social change. Social franchising creates a framework for these people to work in but gives them the freedom to improvise around the areas that add value to the local community, some call this ‘freedom in a framework’.
A Silver Bullet? The more great organisations I work with, the more I realise how much this is not a silver bullet ‘easy’ solution. The organisations that I have seen who have managed to grow through franchising and other forms of replication have dedicated years to perfecting the model and making it work before rapid scale is possible.
Scale is a tough nut to crack but others have done it and with careful planning and focus it is possible. There are a range of resources on our web site to help you on your journey and I would be really interested to hear from anyone who has their own stories of trying to replicate – either good or bad – and anyone who wants to design their project for scale.
Dan Berelowitz is CEO of the International Centre for Social Franchising. Tweet @DanICSF
If you would like to receive more information about the ICSF and how you can design your project to scale please contact info@the-icsf.org .
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