Scaling Growth is a Dynamic Process

This week’s readings covered the efficiency and social impact challenges that social ventures face as they evaluate and implement growth strategies. In addition to considering their short-term and long-term capacity for scaling, a venture’s growth strategy can also be influenced and sometimes strained by the metrics and relationships defined by partners and trends among competitors in the market.

The ubiquitous and traditional idea that rapid business growth equates to success[1] is outdated and not applicable to most social ventures. Oftentimes the success of a social venture must consider the long-term implications of their growth on their mission.  

Depending on the kind of impact that is sought, slow and conscientious development is best. I witnessed these challenges and the like at my most previous position in a human services non-profit that served homeless families in Norfolk, VA. Our goals for growth were often countered by new funding restrictions and guidelines put into place by our donors and even the federal government. For example, the federal government slowly decreased their funding of homeless shelters nationwide and this impacted our growth model.

While we understood how the new funding restrictions were modeled after an approach geared to serve more families, our agency saw how this pressure to serve more families would lead to a decrease in service quality. In the short term, we saw how this approach lead to less stability for the families we served. To counter this pressure to change our program model, we evolved our fundraising team and strategy to fill the gap of less funding. This was a case where our staffing and fundraising partnerships became a growth priority.

In the case of larger benefit corporations, like Patagonia[2], assessment platforms like B Impact Assessment proved to be a useful and effective way for the company to measure their performance and their impact comparatively in the market.

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[1] https://hbr.org/2013/01/its-not-all-about-growth-for-s

[2] http://bimpactassessment.net/case-studies/elissa-loughman