Research on Scaling Social Impact

Developing rigorous and practical knowledge is key to the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship's (CASE) mission to promote entrepreneurial leadership in the social sector through the thoughtful application of business expertise. To that end, Senior Research Associate John Kalafatas is leading CASE's research initiative on "scaling social impact," which builds on prior work by Faculty Director Greg Dees and Lecturer and Managing Director Beth Anderson. The effort is funded by the Skoll Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The goal of the ongoing project is to generate knowledge that enables social entrepreneurs to increase their social impact more effectively. "While some social sector organizations have scaled their impact dramatically," explains Kalafatas, "most are small in absolute terms and in proportion to the social problem they work to improve. Those that have reached significant scale often took many decades to grow. In fact, only one of the 25 largest U.S. nonprofit service organizations — Habitat for Humanity — was founded in the last 25 years. CASE has prioritized this avenue of research because of the challenge practitioners face and because CASE is positioned to build and integrate knowledge about this interdisciplinary and evolving topic."

"By social impact," says Kalafatas, "we mean the value created for beneficiaries, society and the world by a social purpose organization or service, whether nonprofit or for-profit. Scaling social impact is the process of increasing or growing the impact a social-purpose organization produces to better match the magnitude of the social need or problem it seeks to address."

The research has several phases. In December 2005, CASE conducted an exploratory survey sent to over 750 practicing social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders to learn about their past practices, future plans and assumptions about scaling social impact. Kalafatas reports, "We learned that respondents do want to scale their social impact, have experienced mixed success in doing so and are eager to learn more. They are attempting a wide variety of approaches to scaling social impact, some of which do not imply growing the organization itself. While direct strategies are designed to expand or improve the services provided directly by the organization, indirect strategies enable other organizations to expand their direct impact or even to change the political, cultural or economic environment to reduce the need or problem." For those in the social sector who want to learn more about scaling social impact, CASE has completed an annotated bibliography summarizing the literature on the topic and will be compiling a catalog of existing case studies that illustrate real world examples. All of these resources are available on the Scaling Social Impact page on the CASE website (www.scalingsocialimpact.org).

On March 7, 2006, CASE hosted a thought leader meeting at Duke to convene a range of scholars, researchers, consultants, funders and other social sector experts to share insights on the challenge of scaling social impact, generate feedback on the center’s research, and identify collective opportunities to advance the field and enable social entrepreneurs to successfully scale their social impact.

Going forward, CASE will pursue research that applies the concept of "business eco-systems" and systems thinking to the challenge of scaling social impact. "Our hypothesis," says Kalafatas, "is that both an individual organization’s impact and all of the relevant actors’ collective impact on a given social problem can be increased more effectively and efficiently if all of the players understand and use a systems approach. Understanding the dynamics and feedback loops in a system can help improve the chances that one’s intervention addresses the problem sustainably and avoids unintended negative consequences. Such knowledge can enable social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, funders, consultants, policy makers and other social sector actors to (1) understand and navigate a system to find their own best leverage points for creating and scaling social impact, and (2) where appropriate, coordinate and collaborate to build the whole system’s capacity to scale impact relative to the social need in question."

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Kalafatas brings to this work 15 years of nonprofit leadership, management and consulting experience, including serving as regional director and as director of strategic planning at City Year, Inc., a growing national service and leadership development organization.