Five strategies for funders to achieve impact at scale

The co-hosts at our event shared their perspectives on strategies that work (and don’t) to fund for impact at scale, and we crowdsourced further input from event participants. These insights can be summarised in five main strategies.

1. Find a balance between trust-based funding and co-creation, which recognises the power disparity between funders and implementers

Many of our event participants drew a distinction between trust-based funding, a la MacKenzie Scott grants which are effectively blank cheques for implementing organisations, and funding that involves funders working intimately with their grantees or investees to co-create interventions to solve problems. 

Trust-based funding is much beloved by implementing organisations, who describe it as utterly freeing. But co-creation is not the antithesis of trust-based funding; indeed, it can build greater levels of trust between funders and implementers, and create champions of funding partners. It can also push organisational thinking, forcing implementers to be clearer about their mission and strategy. As Sanjay Joshie from FES reflected on his experience of co-design with collaborative fund Co-Impact: “We have to be able to communicate what we do and answer fundamental questions. If our funder doesn’t understand it, how can a government partner?” 

But to do co-creation effectively, funders must be cognisant of the inherent power dynamics. As an audience member noted: “If you’re a funder, you’re the smartest and most beautiful person in the room”. Funders that do co-creation well are focused on listening and learning, as well as asking hard questions. They are open to failure – not just in words but in actions – and fund implementers for the time and resources they invest in the co-creation process.

2. Recognise that systems change often requires a different scaling pathway to scaling delivery of a solution, and requires different metrics for success

It’s hard to talk about impact at scale without talking about systems change. If funders are serious about impact at scale, they must support and fund implementing organisations to consider systems change. But as we well know, systems change is slow, uncertain, complex, and hard to control. It often involves working with government and nearly always involves working in coalitions. What’s more, striving towards systems change often requires a radically different way of working for implementers, which they have to figure out while simultaneously scaling up their core intervention. 

Funders who want to support systems change have to be comfortable with emergence, and support organisations to test, learn and fail. This means moving away from ‘vanity metrics’, ie how many people reached, which overwhelmingly incentivise implementers to focus on proving they are doing good work. Instead, funders must prioritise metrics that encourage testing and learning for systems change, focusing for example on ‘what have you learnt?’ and ‘what different mindsets are we seeing among influential stakeholders?’

3. Encourage organisations to identify their comparative advantage and open themselves up to collaboration with other implementers

Naturally, implementers tend to focus on how they can scale a solution through their own organisations. But as Hannah Barker from Spring Impact stated: “No single organisation can solve a problem at scale. Thinking about who in the system is best placed to get a solution to scale – even if that means letting go yourself – can sometimes be the best way forward for systems change”. 

Funders can support organisations to understand where they can best contribute to solving a problem, be that in ideation, research, implementation, influencing, or something else. Funders can also help implementers to identify who else in the system can help scale a solution, and broker potential partnerships. These partnerships take time to develop, and require a shift in mindset from competition to collaboration. Funders can support this mindset shift, including by paying implementers for their time in forging ecosystem initiatives. As Sam Owilly from BOMA put it: “If we can all understand our greatest value add, we’ll make it easier to build partnerships that put capabilities to use where they matter most”.

4. Collaborate with other funders to shift mindsets from funding projects to solving systemic problems

As Mitali Wrocynski from Co-Impact put it: “To solve the scale of the deep rooted problems we face today in the world, we need to fund at scale. No single funder or donor can do this;  funders cannot achieve impact at scale by operating in isolation. We need to come together to provide the scale of funding to match the scale of the problem, and to learn together about what works, and what doesn’t work, in tackling systemic boulders”. 

When funders work to bring together coalitions, they not only streamline funding processes and unlock larger amounts of capital, but they increase learning, avoid reinventing the wheel, and shift mindsets. According to Vivek Singh from IKEA Foundation, “This is when multi-year funding happens, because funders have bought into a vision rather than an individual project”.

5. Meet implementers where they are, recognising that the journey to scale is a long and messy one – and build their capacity to get there

Funding for impact at scale requires patience and a long-term perspective, and means giving implementing organisations the flexibility to adapt to and exploit emerging opportunities. This is obvious in theory, but the funding practices that correlate to the theory – ie providing organisations with core, multi-year, flexible funding that allows for continuous review and iteration – rarely show up in practice.

Moreover, the skills and mindsets needed to start and maintain an organisation are completely different from the skills and mindsets needed for scale. As Sanjay Joshie at FES said, impact at scale requires a “fundamental shift in mindset from scaling what works, to scaling what works at scale”. Indeed, the user testing we’ve done at Spring Impact has indicated three key capabilities that organisations need to develop to scale effectively: impact measurement, fundraising, and strategy/change management. As Hannah Barker from Spring Impact put it: “Funders that want to achieve impact at scale recognise the need to invest in building these capabilities, and to invest in leaders that will adapt and solve problems in the future, not just scale what they’re doing in the here and now.” 

Conclusion

To achieve impact at scale, we need true partnerships between funders themselves, between funders and  implementing organisations, and we need coalitions of implementing organisations. As Vivek Singh from IKEA Foundation stated, this means “partnerships that have not only mission alignment – but alignment on values, mutual trust and respect, and keeping the big picture in mind without ego.” 

And while this blog post is full of advice for funders, there was also advice in the room for implementing organisations: to stay the course. There is power that resides with implementers to resist pressure for restricted funding that constraints the growth and innovation needed to scale. As an audience member stated: “It’s your cause, you pick your funders.” 

Thank you to the Skoll Foundation and Marmalade Festival for bringing together so many incredible leaders and change-makers for a week in Oxford, to our brilliant co-hosts, and to everyone who made the time and effort to join our event at the Forum. We look forward to working with you, cheering you on, and learning from you on your journeys to scale.

Photo credit: Marmalade Festival