Today’s Seed for Thought comes from the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s blog, a site that covers (as the name suggests) social innovation and related conepts like philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit organizational development. In the latter category, an article today provided a five-question checklist for nonprofits to assess their readiness to scale and increase their impact. The second question asked whether your program model has been tested: according to a survey of American nonprofits, “only 39 percent of nonprofits that are scaling or intending to scale have evaluated the impact of their work”. To me, that’s a surprising result – in my mind, before growing a program or initiative you should take some time to make sure it’s actually achieving the results that you think it is!

Although I’m glad that evaluation is included in the list, I think there’s a danger that evaluation and research is relegated to a one-time “check it off the list” task. In scaling a program to new communities or populations, organizations are bound to run into unexpected challenges. Elements and approaches that were beneficial in the initial program may be less useful or even detrimental in new situations. One example from my own experience was with an educational support program that had its roots in a dense urban core and was being scaled to other smaller cities. The new site I was involved with was very different from the original program site in terms of geography, history, and demographics: for example, the original site was very ethnically diverse, while the families in the catchment area for the new site were primarily white and had lived in Canada for multiple generations. As a result, our new site did not have to do much work around English as a Second/Additional Language, but we did face unique challenges such as around parent and family engagement. Collecting and analyzing information about our neighbourhood, both government sources like the Census and on-the-ground knowledge from teachers, service providers, and community members, helped us to understand the context and respond appropriately.

Funds, resources, and organizational practices are important elements to consider when scaling up: at the same time, nonprofits need the capacity to recognize the changes that come with growth and adapt accordingly. One tool that can be helpful in this case is developmental evaluation, which as recognized in Michael Quinn Patton’s handbook on the subject, can help organizations identify effective principles from earlier work and determine when it’s better to adapt to local conditions rather than adhere to acontextual “best practices”. By integrating relevant and timely data collection and sense-making into the process, developmental evaluation can help nonprofits learn more about the new situations they are entering, avoid potential pitfalls, and successfully scale.

What else would you add to the checklist?