Abstract
Nonprofit organizations addressing societal challenges such as hunger, poverty, and racial inequities want to grow the impact of their promising solutions to these problems—scaling social impact. Yet, local, community-based nonprofits often struggle to identify a path to scale their impact. To address this problem, the authors partnered with 11 nonprofits engaged in social impact scaling. By integrating insights on scaling from these nonprofit research partners together with academic research on scaling across a range of disciplines, they outline a framework for scaling community-based nonprofits and the marketing practices that support it. This research advances a two-stage social impact scaling framework termed “T-shaped Scaling.” Within this framework, the vertical bar of the T refers to “scaling deep,” grounding solutions within a community, and the horizontal bar of the T represents “scaling wide,” adapting and transferring the scaled deep solutions to new communities. This framework advances both conceptual and practical understandings of social impact scaling. Finally, the authors explore the policy implications of social impact scaling and call on researchers in marketing to further investigate the scaling strategies and marketing practices that grow social impact.
Nonprofit organizations address people's pressing needs—hunger, poverty, racial inequities, and other injustices—and work to develop promising solutions to these problems (Bloom 2012; Bloom and Smith 2010; Dees 2008). There are 1.3 million nonprofit organizations in the United States, and 92% of these nonprofits are small, community-based organizations serving people in a particular locality (Carter et al. 2019). Khalil Cumberbatch, Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, underscored the vital role of these local nonprofits in making a difference and noted, “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution” (Kitchen 2017). Policy makers, funders, and nonprofit leaders echo Cumberbatch's sentiment and further advise local nonprofit organizations making a positive impact within their community of origin to grow by transferring their promising solutions to more localities (Bloom 2012; Bloom and Smith 2010; Dees, Anderson, and Wei-Skillern 2004; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015). Community-based nonprofits are urged to “scale” their organizations, with scaling defined as “increasing the impact a social-purpose organization produces to better match the magnitude of the social need or problem it seeks to address” (Dees 2008, p. 18; see also Bloom and Smith 2010).
Yet, even community-based nonprofits with sufficient funding and organizational capacity struggle to scale their organizations beyond their communities of origin (Ebrahim and Rangan 2014; Waitzer and Paul 2011). In fact, very few community-based nonprofits have successfully scaled their operations (Westley et al. 2014), and the path for such organizations to scale is unclear (Ebrahim and Rangan 2014). In multiple Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) articles, Bloom (2009, 2012) has recognized the need for a greater understanding of social impact scaling and called for researchers to explore how to scale social impact. We answer this call. Our research advances conceptual and practical understanding of social impact scaling by synthesizing prior work on scaling deep and scaling wide and examining marketing practices to build a process-oriented framework for community-based nonprofits to scale their impact and communicate their strategies to public policy influencers, funders, and other stakeholders.
Many nonprofits are adept at understanding the local community in which they work, which allows them to successfully address societal challenges in that locality (Emery and Flora 2006; Eversole 2010). Indeed, David Brooks (2018a) advises that the tools for scaling social impact reside “at the tip of the shovel, where the actual work is being done … among those who have local knowledge, those with a feel for how things work in a specific place, and an awareness of who gets stuff done. Success is not measured by how big you can scale, but by how deeply you can connect.” Brooks’s advice suggests that community-based nonprofits addressing societal challenges effectively in a locality are “scaling deep.” In other words, these nonprofits achieve impact by embedding deeply to leverage local expertise and resources to address a community's specific challenges (Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins 2019; Bublitz, Peracchio, et al. 2019; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015). Acting locally leverages knowledge about a community, including its power dynamics, which is often essential in overcoming tensions that make implementing change difficult (Stoecker 2003). Scaling deep involves establishing strong local relationships and an intimate understanding of a community.
Yet, the magnitude of societal ills and the imperative to repair them suggests that effective scaling-deep efforts should in some way proliferate. Thus, we propose a second step in the scaling process to follow scaling deep: “scaling wide,” which involves connecting local scaling-deep efforts regionally, nationally, and globally through sharing ideas and promising practices to increase societal impact (Bloom 2009; Bradach and Grindle 2014; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015). We model this two-stage scaling framework, scaling deep and scaling wide, after literature on “T-shaped” people—managers (Hansen and Von Oetinger 2001), marketers (Rust, Moorman, and Bhalla 2010), and innovators (Barile, Saviano, and Simone 2015)—who cultivate both deep and broad skill sets. Here, we extend this concept beyond people to describe the practices of organizations. Accordingly, we synthesize prior literature to lay out a series of steps community-based nonprofits can take to scale deep and then scale wide to grow their impact. We call this two-stage social impact scaling process “T-shaped Scaling,” in which the vertical bar of the T refers to scaling deep—akin to the roots of a tree, anchoring solutions within a community—and the horizontal bar of the T denotes scaling wide, propagating verdant practices in new communities.
We begin with a review of the academic literature on social impact scaling. Then, we describe our research method. Next, we integrate the scaling insights and practices of our nonprofit research partners with the academic literature streams focused on scaling to establish our two-stage framework for scaling social impact and the marketing best practices that support this framework. Our aim is not only to advance our conceptual understanding of how to scale social impact but also to offer a practical scaling strategy that community-based nonprofits can deploy. Finally, we highlight public policy recommendations for supporting social impact scaling and offer ideas that marketing scholars can investigate to advance knowledge about scaling social impact.
Scaling Social Impact: A Literature Review
Research on scaling organizations has a rich history across myriad academic domains including marketing (Bloom and Smith 2010; Epstein and Yuthas 2012), community development (Emery and Flora 2006; Eversole 2010; Markley, Lyons, and Macke 2015), management (Bloom and Chatterji 2009; Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins 2019), and social innovation (Waitzer and Paul 2011). The Appendix provides a summary of relevant scaling research across these various disciplines. We aim to unite insights from these diverse literatures to assist community-based nonprofits, which struggle to scale social impact and all too frequently “fail to scale their impact to the desired level” (Newbert 2012, p. 75; see also Bloom and Chatterji 2009). Researchers describe the literature on scaling strategies for nonprofits as insufficient relative to its societal importance (Weber, Kröger, and Lambrich 2012), calling on scholars “to explore the scalability process” (Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins 2019, p. 231) and acknowledging that the “scaling rate is shockingly low” for nonprofits (Ebrahim and Rangan 2014, p. 135).
Despite the need for insight into community-based nonprofit scaling, much of the research on scaling has focused on for-profit organizations. In a for-profit business context, scaling refers to the growth of an organization (West 2017) and is often measured via increased sales, assets, and employment (Bercovitz and Mitchell 2007), all of which correlate positively with greater organization size. Whereas for-profit organizations adopt a customer-centric approach to “delight customers” with an aim toward “building profitable relationships” (Armstrong and Kotler 2004, p. 7), the goal of nonprofits’ customer orientation is to better distribute “the net benefit [of the services offered] across target beneficiaries” (Talukdar, Gulyani, and Salmen 2005, p. 108). Thus, successful scaling increases nonprofits’ capacity to address a societal problem and improves their pursuit of social impact outcomes (Bloom and Smith 2010; Dees 2008). Despite these differences, nonprofits have largely modeled their scaling strategies on those used by for-profit enterprises, where the normative path for scaling involves identifying an innovation and then replicating it—growing the organization by duplicating programs to serve more people in more communities (Dees, Anderson, and Wei-Skillern 2004).
A common framework for both for-profit and nonprofit scaling is franchising, wherein a franchisor licenses its business concept to a franchisee, using a model of replication across time and space to grow (Michael 2003; Sørensen and Sørensen 2001). Franchisees pay to replicate the franchisor's marketing strategies, organizational routines, and operating manuals (Sørensen and Sørensen 2001). Although some local adaptation may be allowed, franchising requires rigid operational standards and depends heavily on unconditional compliance from partners (Davies et al. 2011; Sørensen and Sørensen 2001). Franchising, and more generally the normative growth model for scaling, involves replicating or closely copying a successful model (Szulanski and Winter 2002; Zook and Allen 2011) while streamlining the organization's core innovations to facilitate extraction and reproduction (Weber, Kröger, and Lambrich 2012; World Health Organization 2010). Traditional approaches to scaling, therefore, frequently downplay the need for adaptation, focusing instead on conditions that allow for replication. Similar to for-profit organizations, nonprofits replicate and streamline their business models to achieve scale, with the goal of evolving from small, local entities to regional, national, or global organizations (Bloom and Chatterji 2009; Bloom and Smith 2010). In detailing how to develop a social impact scaling strategy, the World Health Organization (2010, p. 11) recommends that nonprofits “simplify/streamline the innovation, but ensure that the essential components are maintained during scale up.” By simplifying and streamlining an innovation, organizations are advised to facilitate the ease of transfer of their program to new outlets through a process of decontextualized transplantation, which involves the extraction of core elements of a model from their current context followed by reproduction in a new locality.
Yet, many community-based nonprofits are not able to extract innovative and effective solutions from the communities in which they emerged and seamlessly replicate them in new communities (Dees, Anderson, and Wei-Skillern 2004). Community-based nonprofits that are deeply embedded within their locality may be effectively addressing community challenges; however, when they attempt to transplant their solutions to a new locality, these new communities may not respond similarly. This may be because the pressing societal challenges many community-based nonprofits aim to address stem from a complex web of underlying local causes and nuanced community circumstances rather than a distinct cause or a singular need that may be addressed similarly in a variety of localities. Poverty, for example, is often an underlying cause of profound challenges such as hunger, inadequate housing, racial inequities, and health disparities. Recent evidence suggests that the impact of poverty on people's lives differs dramatically, even for those living in similar communities (Brooks 2018b; Klinenberg 2018). Specifically, findings from the Opportunity Atlas, a research partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, reveal that life outcomes may differ widely for children living in geographically and demographically similar, and even adjacent, poor communities (Chetty and Hendren 2018).
The findings of this research, together with research in community development (Emery and Flora 2006; Eversole 2010; Mandell 2010), underscore that community is an essential “unit of social change” (Brooks 2018b) and help explain why, even with skilled leaders executing top-down leadership, some nonprofits that attempt to scale their organizations using replication-based strategies have found the process to be difficult and have experienced limited success (Dees, Anderson, and Wei-Skillern 2004). To transform people's lives in a given locality, organizations need a deep understanding of place (Grenni, Soini, and Horlings 2019). Relationship building and collaboration are paramount to successful community change (Emery and Bregendahl 2014), tapping into social bonds and trust within neighborhoods (Mandell 2010). A community's entrepreneurial ecosystem can empower individuals and organizations (Markley, Lyons, and Macke 2015) providing cultural, financial, human, and political capital to create change (Gutierrez-Montes, Emery, and Fernandez-Baca 2009). Transformative pathways for social impact are frequently community-specific; thus, undifferentiated solutions that overlook what is important and meaningful in a community often do not work (Grenni, Soini, and Horlings 2019).
While traditional business and innovation models recommend replication-based scaling strategies, research from the community development literature highlights that a top-down approach, transplanting an innovation from one community to another, may not work (Eversole 2010). Furthermore, scaling often assumes that the efficiencies resulting from standardization across different localities will contribute to success, and that organizations will subsequently benefit from the economies of scale that emanate from these efficient processes and routines (Szulanski and Winter 2002). However, this may not always be the case for community-based nonprofits. Economies of scale tend to be smaller in the social impact sector (Dadzie et al. 2013; Waitzer and Paul 2011). In addition, efficient nonprofit systems, when replicated, may become unidimensional, less innovative, and less responsive to local conditions, which in turn may limit their growth and social impact success in new localities (West 2017). Thus, focusing too intently on efficiency can negate the essential role of community, undermining a nonprofit's ability to listen and respond to challenges as they occur in a local environment (Wheatley and Frieze 2011) and to leverage local assets when designing and delivering a solution.
In this research, we synthesize insights from various literatures on scaling into a singular two-stage framework for scaling social impact. We gather data to highlight the process and the marketing practices nonprofits use to scale their organizations. Our T-shaped Scaling framework integrates insights from the literature with our empirical research to establish a roadmap for community-based nonprofits to scale social impact. In the next section, we describe our methodology for studying social impact scaling and introduce our nonprofit research partners.
Methodology
To investigate community-based scaling, we assembled a research team that included nonprofit leaders who collaborated with the academic members to (1) identify exemplars of scaling; (2) investigate nonprofit scaling practices; (3) identify patterns, validate, and refine a scaling framework for community-based nonprofits; and (4) provide rich examples that illustrate T-shaped Scaling practices. By including these nonprofit leaders as members of our team, we gained a deeper understanding of the scaling process and firsthand accounts of the marketing practices used to scale social impact (Davis, Ozanne, and Hill 2016; Ozanne et al. 2017). In doing so, we adhere to methodological precedent for including nonprofit collaborators as research team members (Mitra et al. 2022; Ozanne and Ozanne 2021). Following Ozanne et al.’s (2017) relational engagement approach, we view these leaders as partners in the research. The typology of relational engagement pathways (Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022) terms this research “capacity building,” as we sought to identify challenges and the strategies and practices to overcome those challenges, ultimately outlining a framework for scaling community-based nonprofits.
In the relational engagement tradition (Bublitz et al. 2021; Bublitz, Peracchio, et al. 2019; Ozanne et al. 2017), our nonprofit partners’ participation in this research was collaborative over a period of six to eight months. Our research process was abductive, following the stepwise, iterative approach recommended by Janiszewski and Van Osselaer (2022, p. 17) to “hypothesize, observe, analyze, organize and prioritize” with a goal of developing a conceptual framework. This method followed the process employed in Bublitz et al.'s (2021) JPP&M article, which Janiszewski and Van Osselaer feature as an exemplar for conducting discovery-oriented abductive research. There are two critical benefits of the abductive research method for studying social impact scaling. First, when existing theoretical frames do not provide an explanation, are ambiguous, or are in conflict, abductive research methods offer an opportunity to expand our thinking and develop novel theory that better explains phenomena (Janiszewski and Van Osselaer 2022). Studying how community-based nonprofits scale solutions to complex societal problems may benefit from this method because current theories do not work well for many nonprofits attempting to scale their social impact solutions. In fact, the problem of scaling social impact has plagued researchers and practitioners as they sought to use existing theories and practice shown to work in a for-profit setting with limited progress toward scaling in the social sector (Bloom and Chatterji 2009; Ebrahim and Rangan 2014; Newbert 2012). Second, abduction places importance on “locally actionable research” with a focus on external validity where researchers can examine variable relationships and explore background factors in the complex environments where they occur (Janiszewski and Van Osselaer 2022). Here, the many causes of social ills are complex and often local, making a flexible and adaptable scaling framework essential.
We secured Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. 1 Table 1 identifies and describes our nonprofit partner organizations. These organizations are identified with their permission to recognize their work and intellectual contribution to the ideas in this framework and to spotlight their promising practices so that other nonprofits may look to them as examples and seek out more detail about their initiatives. We interviewed senior leaders—executive directors, founders, and others responsible for scaling strategy—at each of these organizations. These leaders are identified with pseudonyms; one pseudonym is employed per organization.
Research Partner Organizations.
We began our research by interviewing a purposive sample of community-based nonprofit leaders about their promising scaling practices and used snowball sampling to identify other nonprofits successfully scaling social impact (Alam 2002). We supplemented our initial 60- to 90-minute guided interviews, conducted by teleconference, as our research partners were located across the United States, with publicly available information, for example, organizational websites and news coverage. We returned to our research partners throughout the process of analyzing and synthesizing with clarifying questions; we also asked them for their perspectives on the practices observed and conclusions drawn. Through this process, we identified patterns and organized them into a framework (Eisenhardt 1989; Janiszewski and Van Osselaer 2022) that highlights the critical elements of the scaling process. Next, we introduce our scaling framework.
T-shaped Scaling
Among those seeking impactful societal change, there are calls for “organizations working in the social sector that … have an infrastructure in place that allows them to grow” (Sullivan 2018). In this spirit, policy makers, funders, and nonprofit leaders frequently urge community-based nonprofits to expand and grow their impact. At the same time, community-based nonprofits need to leverage their strengths by remaining flexible and adaptive to the locality in which they operate, relying on collaboration with local stakeholders to cocreate impactful community-based solutions for societal challenges. T-shaped Scaling, a two-stage social impact scaling strategy, provides a framework for community-based nonprofits to build an infrastructure for growth. First, organizations scale deep, embedding deeply in a locality by developing an understanding of the community, establishing local relationships, and customizing programs for the community. Then, nonprofits scale wide, connecting local insights and ideas among communities by creating knowledge systems through which they share, adapt, and transfer their approach within an integrated network of organizations (Achrol 1997). T-shaped Scaling offers a viable path to scale social impact by allowing community-based nonprofits to maintain the competencies they have embedded in the communities they serve, while also sharing their promising practices with other communities. We present the two components of our T-shaped Scaling framework in succession, beginning with scaling deep.
Scaling Deep
We define scaling deep as a community-based approach to understanding the challenges a community faces and designing innovative local solutions that address the circumstances at the root of those challenges. These local solutions often involve community stakeholders and community-based organizations such as schools, other nonprofits, governmental agencies, and local businesses. Researchers from a variety of academic domains have used the term “scaling deep” (Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins 2019; Bublitz, Peracchio, et al. 2019; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015). Our research integrates these prior conceptualizations, expands on what scaling deep is, and, most importantly, provides a process for how community-based nonprofits can effectively scale deep. More specifically, we identify the marketing practices that are essential to scaling deep. As Scott and Vallen (2019) point out, an organization's marketing strategies and practices influence consumer and community choices. Marketing by nonprofits has been shown to advance mission-oriented outcomes and social impact (Bublitz, Hansen, et al. 2019; Shah and George 2021). As community-based nonprofits address critical needs, their marketing practices transform a community from the bottom up by helping them “forge partnerships,” “mobilize public will,” and “tailor strategy to distinctive features of place” (Markusen and Gadwa 2010, p. 5). The marketing practices that allow nonprofits to increase their impact by scaling deep are outlined in Figure 1 and described in the next section. The drivers and barriers for scaling deep are listed in Web Appendix A. We conclude this section with a case study featuring one of our research partners.
T-shaped Scaling.
Discover, Identify, and Connect with Stakeholders
Critical stakeholders in scaling deep include individuals, groups, and organizations who either have the power to influence, or are influenced by, key stakeholders: community, external, and wedge people/organizations. Community stakeholders include residents, members of community organizations (e.g., churches), local governmental employees, and people working in neighborhood businesses, as well as the groups and organizations they represent. The people within a community have an insider's view—an experiential perspective—of the community's needs, resources, and operations. Engaging with these local stakeholders acknowledges and leverages their cultural competencies (Demangeot et al. 2013). Our nonprofit partners described the essential role of community stakeholders. Noah (Project Row Houses) explained, You need to develop relationships through outreach first, you have to know who in the community are the leaders. Then value the resources [people and organizations] that already exist in the community—value the voices of the community—solutions to the problem do exist in the community.
Given that trust is vital when people act in the face of uncertainty and risk (Ekici and Peterson 2009), community-based nonprofits are positioned to engage community stakeholders who understand local challenges and can help the nonprofit establish trust in a community (Emery and Bregendahl 2014). Noah (Project Row Houses) further explained, “You need to do lots of legwork to bring community together. If you want residents at the table, they need to be invited.”
Community-based nonprofits must invest time, effort, and resources to deepen the quality and subsequent strength of their relationships with local stakeholders. Involving community members can empower those who feel powerless (e.g., people who are marginalized in a community) as “informed participants in development” of their community (Talukdar, Gulyani, and Salmen 2005, p. 104). Such investments yield a reciprocal response from the community as its members experience psychological ownership and, in turn, develop agency and voice that propels them to promote the organization's efforts (Talukdar, Gulyani and Salmen 2005). According to Marina (Mural Arts), Building trust takes time and repeated [community] engagement where we consistently deliver outcomes. Over time, people realize we are not “community engagement theatre,” we are not just going to up and leave. We live out our values.
Business associations, governmental entities, education partners, and foundations or private funders are external stakeholders who comprise the larger ecosystem in which the nonprofit operates (Bublitz, Rank-Christman, et al. 2019; Markley, Lyons, and Macke 2015). Understanding the resources offered and constraints imposed by external stakeholders is an important element when setting realistic goals and developing operational plans (Crittenden et al. 2003). Avelene (Brooklyn Justice Initiative) points out that “getting buy-in from established community partners and [external] stakeholders is key.” Both community and external stakeholders, particularly those with a vested interest in the nonprofit's success and those critical to the process of change, should be involved early in a nonprofit's efforts within a community (Kenny 2014).
Among these community and external stakeholders are essential people or organizations who are in positions of respect and power and can act as liaisons for nonprofits working to connect with a community. Ronnie (Recess Art) refers to these people and organizations as “wedges” in the community. These wedge people and organizations make critical introductions between the nonprofit and community members and serve as a “foot in the door,” facilitating relationships and access. Wedge people and organizations are often well-established community stakeholders who possess credibility and trust in a locality, particularly among social groups within the nonprofit's target population. Marina (Mural Arts) advises, “Identify and work with existing leaders.” Identifying and connecting with these individuals helps nonprofits establish vital community connections that allow them to scale deep.
Drive Deep Community Engagement Through Active Listening
Active listening is “the cognitive process of actively sensing, interpreting, evaluating, and responding to the verbal and nonverbal messages” (Castleberry and Shepherd 1993, p. 36). Research on how salespeople form relationships suggests that active listening increases trust and satisfaction (Aggarwal et al. 2005). Katie (Laundromat Project) explained, Our initial two-month intensive training teaches how to enter a community, really listen deeply, build relationships, learn what matters to the community. Don’t assume you know even if you are part of a community.
Active listening reveals stakeholder experiences that aid the nonprofit in understanding critical community issues. Our partners emphasized the vital role of active listening. In describing Mural Arts’ methods, Marina emphasized this point saying, “You have to listen—really listen.”
Our nonprofit partners actively listen to community members as a means to collaborate with and learn from them. Further, active listening deepens relationships and increases commitment (Comer and Drollinger 1999). Invariably, listening will lead the nonprofit to ask more questions. This iterative process takes time but also allows space for the nonprofit and the community to build their relationship. Avelene (Brooklyn Justice Initiative) points out, It is a slow-moving process; we foster relationships with face-to-face meetings and phone calls. It is a dual focus on care and compliance. Everyone has a unique identity with individual needs. Listening leads to understanding the root cause of the problem.
Avelene goes on to emphasize the importance of this step in ensuring that community members are heard and respected, a critical step to developing client-based solutions with community buy-in. As part of that process, the stakeholders and nonprofit may develop a common, community-specific language with which to address the locality's challenges and propose potential solutions. Marina (Mural Arts) highlights the importance of taking time for “partners to build trust and rapport, to find a common language and vision” before embarking on a project. Beyond the act of listening, active listening impacts how participants, including the nonprofit, respond and ultimately design solutions. Katie (Laundromat Project) explains the essential role of “listening deeply, not talking, and shifting in relation to what one hears.” Opening up communication channels creates transparency, which helps the nonprofit and community stakeholders develop a shared vision, set of values, goals, and clear expectations—all of which are critical to designing a scaled deep solution to address a community's needs.
Develop Shared Space and Common Ground
Successful nonprofits that establish a presence in a community demonstrate a willingness to become an integral part of that community. Noah (Project Row Houses) points out how being “all-in” by “embedding deeply within a community is the most critical component of success.” According to Elena (COA), “You have to be rooted in the community … organize events that spark relationships and build the ‘fabric of community.’” This effort by a nonprofit creates shared space for face-to-face contact and hands-on interaction with community members. Research exploring how consumers form relationships with organizations suggests that substantial power is in the hands of community stakeholders “to voluntarily establish attachments to organizations” (Garbarino and Johnson 1999, p. 82). Katie (Laundromat Project) explains that this “human-to-human contact cannot be replaced.” She further notes, Using art for community engagement is about [being] in the neighborhood. Building on the concept of place, identify different challenges, invest in the root causes of problems, and mobilize the community. Be in the community, do not erase the culture.
Some permanency of nonprofit presence may be seen as an investment that illustrates the nonprofit's community commitment. Ronnie (Recess Art) states, “It is disingenuous to just talk about these issues without connecting to the communities directly affected by these issues. There must be an emphasis on sharing space.” In addition, sharing space reduces perceived barriers by creating common ground within a workspace that empowers a community, shifting a community's view of a nonprofit from that of an outsider to an insider, and strengthening the relationship between the community and the nonprofit. Becky (Brownsville Community Justice Center [BCJC]) underscores the essential role of sharing space: “Creating local infrastructure enables systemic change.”
Devise Cocreated Programs and Solutions
The success of scaling strategies depends on engaging the local community in the “formulation and implementation of the solution” (Bradach and Grindle 2014). Collaboration, communication, and cooperation enhance a nonprofit's ability to effectively cocreate solutions with stakeholders (Anderson et al. 2016; Trischler and Charles 2019). Noah of Project Row Houses warns, “Avoid a paternalistic view [of] ‘we know what you need.’ Instead, make space within community for collaboration, invite residents to the table.” Becky (BCJC) explains that BCJC's “civic engagement and placemaking projects grew out of workshops with young people” where these initiatives were cocreated. Avelene (Brooklyn Justice Initiative) points out, Each community is unique because the problems and the resources are different so the relationships you form will be different as well. First, build trust and relationships, then work together to solve problems. Involve the client throughout the process.
Engaging community stakeholders enables nonprofits to cocreate innovative community-based solutions (Viswanathan et al. 2009; Weidner, Rosa, and Viswanathan 2010). Ben from the Center for Court Innovation (CCI) stated simply, “Justice is local … be partners, develop mutual goals, and share the workload.” By drawing on the community's experiences, the nonprofit develops collective intelligence, facilitating the development of solutions that are beneficial to the community (Ramaswamy and Gouillart 2010). Noah (Project Row Houses) argues that a nonprofit must “allow everyone to share their ideas to find a way forward.” In this way, involving stakeholders in designing solutions makes them integral to the transformation process and increases their commitment to seeing those solutions succeed (Weidner, Rosa, and Viswanathan 2010) while also deepening the relationship between the nonprofit and stakeholders (Anderson et al. 2016; Trischler and Charles 2019). Marina (Mural Arts) believes cocreation, a feature of Mural Art's process, “creates a window of opportunity to inspire communities to direct their own change.”
For a nonprofit, innovation through cocreation requires collaboration with key stakeholders who have direct experience with the challenge (Lee, Olson, and Trimi 2012). Cocreation and collaboration make the nonprofit, the community, and external stakeholders all partners in program development, delivery, refinement, and management. Emma from Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee described the development of their MyPlate Pantry initiative, which relied heavily on cocreation via direct and open communication with food pantry coordinators: We were the first food bank in the U.S. adopting the USDA's MyPlate nutrition guidelines for healthy eating and building this into our food access programs. We worked with six high-performing pantry sites. They had to get people to consume MyPlate foods, retrain volunteers, and work with us to get the community to donate foods that follow the MyPlate nutrition guidelines. We worked together to refine the program and now we are rolling it out to other community pantries.
Throughout this process, each stakeholder should be open to new ideas and alternative points of view that facilitate a creative reimagining of possible solutions. Katie (Laundromat Project) describes this process as “following the rhythms of communities; listening, slowing down, being open, adaptable, and flexible.” As partners, all have a voice in decisions, empowering community members to embrace their ownership and agency in designing solutions.
Deliver Iterations of Success
By entering a community through a trusted wedge person or organization, actively listening to the community, and then cocreating solutions with the community, nonprofits build trust and gain credibility. Forming strong relationships in a community is a dynamic process that involves repeated engagement with the nonprofit attempting to consistently deliver favorable outcomes to build the necessary trust for successful long-term relationships (Milne, Iyer, and Gooding-Williams 1996). Research indicates that an organization's “success is thus dependent on an ability to effectively build and generate trust” (Nunan and Di Domenico 2019, p. 477). Becky (BCJC) explained how BCJC builds trusted relationships: “The staff reflect the community, allowing our organization to have credibility in working with youth.” Noah (Project Row Houses) further described the importance of “a lot of relationship building and engagement on an ongoing basis.” Over time, this series of relationship experiences provides an opportunity for a nonprofit to reveal not only its motives and intent but also its longer-term commitment to the community. Each successive iteration should utilize an inclusive process focused on understanding and addressing community challenges.
Deepen Relationships and Become the Access Point to Complementary Services
Successful iterations of work in a community enhance individual stakeholder and collective community well-being and establish the nonprofit as a trusted, valued, and engaged partner. Research suggests that through relationship investment, effective communication, and cultivation of a similar focus, organizations enhance the quality of their relationships with stakeholders (Palmatier et al. 2006). Elena (COA) states, COA started with youth programs and then expanded to engaging residents and building assets; people develop a sense of self-efficacy that transitions into community efficacy. [We] built a new park behind our building, partnered with the children's hospital to open a clinic [in our community], then converted a gym to a family center. The result was a 46% decrease in crime in the surrounding neighborhood.
In addition to forming community relationships, nonprofits may also forge relationships with other community-relevant agencies and service providers. Slowly, a cultural shift occurs, changing the behavior of people associated with the nonprofit and community stakeholders, shifting toward a partnership to create impact. By becoming a trusted community partner, the embedded nonprofit itself becomes a wedge organization, providing introductions and facilitating conversations between the community and other organizations that offer complementary services. Emma (Hunger Task Force) describes providing “technology access and using a consultative approach to help clients access benefit programs.” In this way, a nonprofit connects clients to resources in their own community. According to Marina (Mural Arts), nonprofits begin to “drive trust and engagement with a broader group of leaders.” In describing the Brooklyn Justice Initiative, Avelene said, We are the quarterback of Brooklyn: we call the plays, we make connections; we are a matchmaker, connecting people to resources in their communities for long-term support such as counseling, behavioral health services to treat trauma, mental health, addiction.
After scaling deeply and embedding in the community, the nonprofit can build on its intimate understanding of a community to advocate for systemic change. Elena (COA) notes, “We not only want to help kids rise above their circumstances, but also want to change their circumstances.”
When to Scale Deep
Scaling deep has much less impact if community members do not believe that a program addresses their local needs. As Becky (BCJC) stated, “Participants and residents are experts on the neighborhood. Residents know the problems the best.” Thus, community-based nonprofits should scale deep when viable ideas for creating positive social impact are shared by both community stakeholders and the nonprofit. In addition, community-based nonprofits should scale deep when a social impact solution (1) requires partners on the ground with local relationships, (2) addresses a community's unique local challenges, and (3) is inherently rooted in the community. Certainly, they must also possess the funding and organizational capacity to scale deep. The following case study provides an in-depth illustration of when and how to scale deep.
Scaling Deep Case Study: Brownsville Community Justice Center
Brownsville Community Justice Center (BCJC), an initiative of the Center for Court Innovation (CCI), is a scaled-deep, “multi-faceted initiative that seeks to prevent crime by investing in local youth and improving the physical landscape of the [Brownsville] neighborhood” (CCI 2019). Founded in 2011, BCJC aims to “restore local faith in the justice system” and “enhance the quality of life in the community” (CCI 2019). Brownsville, a one-square-mile neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, is home to more than 86,000 people, 96% percent of whom are Black or Hispanic (Bassett 2015). This densely populated community has the seventh-highest concentration of poverty and the highest concentration of public housing in the United States (Bassett 2015; Semuels 2015).
When community stakeholders in Brownsville witnessed leaders in neighboring Red Hook launch a successful initiative to address crime with its nonprofit partner, CCI, they also sought out this nonprofit. CCI began work to discover, identify, and connect with Brownsville stakeholders by hosting a series of initial meetings to discuss Brownsville's high crime rate, particularly among youth aged 18–24 years who were not employed or in school and were disconnected from their neighborhood but often connected to the criminal justice system. In their initial meetings, Brownsville leaders and CCI engaged a wide range of Brownsville stakeholders, including young stakeholders, to better understand Brownsville youth with connections to the justice system. By actively listening, engaging youth, and providing youth access to civic agency, BCJC set the stage for local youth to become cocreators in developing solutions. Over time, this process yielded deeper insights into these youth and ways to engage the community in tackling its criminal justice challenges, resulting in the creation of BCJC. Then, BCJC encouraged the young people themselves to examine the systems in their neighborhood, identify challenges related to those systems, and engage with agencies connected to those systems. For example, Brownsville youth questioned which government agencies were responsible for improving garbage removal and lighting their dark streets and then took action to resolve these problems.
BCJC solidified itself as an internal community partner by launching several youth-focused initiatives. These included establishing a system of community-based courts that apply a problem-solving approach to local crime and help bring restorative justice to those affected by crime (Clear and Karp 1999). BCJC also engaged youth in entrepreneurship training programs resulting in the establishment of the Brownsville Innovation Lab, a shared space where youth previously connected to the criminal justice system developed a pop-up flea market. These programs, cocreated with youth, markedly reduced recidivism, transforming their lives and those of their families and deepening BCJC's relationships in Brownsville. BCJC’s presence in the community transformed from an external organization to an internal community partner.
In Brownsville, residents and stakeholder groups identified the Belmont Avenue corridor—plagued by empty storefronts, graffiti, and uncollected trash—as an area of concern. More critically, Belmont Avenue connected two housing developments with conflicts between their residents resulting in frequent shootings, exacerbating already-high crime rates that subsequently decreased foot traffic and caused many businesses to close. Working with key stakeholders, BCJC facilitated the Belmont Revitalization Project, wherein Brownsville youth cocreated and participated in clean-up campaigns to remove graffiti and extract two tons of trash from the Belmont corridor. The project’s two initiatives, Stronger Together and Be on Belmont, shifted the narrative from that of a crime-ridden area to a place for families and children. One result was a mural created on Osborn Plaza—an area linking the two housing developments—depicting two hands reaching toward each other, a symbol of Brownsville’s collective progress.
The Belmont Revitalization Project included a range of city-wide partners and multiple Brownsville stakeholder groups such as residents, businesses, and social service agencies, all working together to implement projects to transform the Belmont Corridor. The effort required repeated demonstrations of trust and success and a high level of commitment. The positive results of early projects sparked interest from more groups and inspired additional stakeholders to get involved. Over time, the focus of projects shifted from clean-up and relationship restoration to job training and an array of programs designed to accelerate community development. Given the leadership role that youth had played in the project, Belmont Avenue businesses were inclined to hire these youth for local jobs. Other tangible outcomes included more than $500,000 in small business investments, four new social enterprises, and $2 million in federal dollars invested in capital reconstruction and transportation. From 2012 to 2016, the number of major felonies in Brownsville decreased by almost one-third (Wang 2018).
By nurturing relationships with Brownsville residents, BCJC leverages the trust it built in the community to provide access to complementary services, serving as a bridge between residents and external agencies. For example, BCJC employs case managers to offer wraparound services (e.g., counseling, substance abuse treatment, employment services) applying a holistic model of care to address the needs of youth and families connected to the justice system. In addition, BCJC receives referrals from probation officers and the courts as well as BCJC alumni who identify youth who may benefit from its programs; BCJC then reaches out to engage those youth.
As this case study illustrates, BCJC’s scaling-deep practices originate and are steeped in the Brownsville community. The progress in reducing crime in Brownsville was not the result of replicating CCI’s “efficient model” or its initiatives in Red Hook. Instead, BCJC scaled deep, engaging the community in identifying its own challenges and working with residents in shared spaces to cocreate solutions. BCJC’s community-based processes involved listening to, establishing trust with, and engaging community stakeholders and then delivering iterations of success over time. As a CCI partner, BCJC participates in a relationship network to share knowledge and accelerate social impact through justice reform, which leads us to the second step in our T-shaped Scaling framework: scaling wide.
Scaling Wide
Scaled deep solutions often have “a common stem” that communities facing similar challenges can “alter and extend” through customizing, remixing, and shaping (Heimans and Timms 2018, p. 38). In this way, the learning gained by community-based nonprofits through scaling deep can be adapted and transferred by scaling wide. Scaling wide involves connecting scaling-deep efforts by adapting and transferring insights, approaches, and promising practices for greater collective social impact. Ronnie (Recess Art) describes how such transfer occurs: It provides a framework, but it is not a prescribed set of steps where A leads to B … to replicate the program. It is a way of looking at how to solve a problem. You can think of it like an open-source program; we train people on the process but recognize the need for private spaces related to your own groups and relationships.
Prior research has proffered various concepts for organizations to share their approach. For example, from the field of marketing and social innovation, researchers discuss how to leverage networks and alliances to scale (e.g., Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins 2019; Ebrahim and Rangan 2014; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015; Waitzer and Paul 2011). To develop scaling wide, we synthesize and expand on findings that highlight the importance of networking, collaboration, and partnership to collectively achieve impact on a larger scale (Bradach and Grindle 2014; Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015; Waitzer and Paul 2011; Wheatley and Frieze 2011). We detail a marketing-based process for how nonprofits can effectively scale wide. In the absence of a formalized, cooperative, and coordinated initiative that links organizations together, societal transformation is less likely to occur (Shultz et al. 2012).
The strength of a scaling-wide network comes from the fusion of each relationship partner’s expertise and strengths, creating synergy within the group that allows them to accomplish more together than they could individually (Achrol 1997; Achrol and Kotler 1999). According to Ronnie (Recess Art), “Relationships with peer organizations are key; you can’t exist in a vacuum.” But scaling wide is more than forming relationship networks with similar organizations. Aaker and Joachimsthaler (1999, p. 139) suggest that successful sharing partnerships “must nurture and support a culture in which best practices are freely communicated. In addition, people and procedures must come together to create a rich base of knowledge that is relevant and easy to access.” Knowledge is a key component of organizational growth, and successful organizations devise a system for sharing that knowledge with channel and network partners (Achrol 1997). For example, Emma describes how Hunger Task Force shares knowledge during meetings of a statewide network of food access organizations: When [we] meet everyone brings a resource to share—marketing, intake surveys, measures of program impact—and we encourage partners to borrow and learn from each other. We developed a collaborative network for good rather than a competitive group.
Through the knowledge networks formed in scaling wide, scaling-deep insights proliferate. When ideas and solutions are shared, these separate local effects gather momentum as communities collaborate and then work with their own local stakeholders to create collective change (Wheatley and Frieze 2011). However, just as with scaling deep, scaling-wide efforts must be sensitive to context, place, and community. The marketing best practices that allow nonprofits to increase their impact by scaling wide are outlined in Figure 1 and described in detail in the following subsections. The drivers and barriers for scaling wide are listed in Web Appendix B. We conclude with a scaling-wide case study.
Weave Together a Relationship Network
Scaling wide begins when a community-based nonprofit forms or joins a relationship network with other organizations addressing a similar or a complementary set of challenges or opportunities. These networks allow nonprofits to increase their capacity through relationships that transcend communities (Barrios and Blocker 2015). The National Council of Nonprofits recommends the formation of sharing networks as a strategy to increase impact (Chandler and Kennedy 2015). Nonprofits build networks of organizations as a strategic tool to pool resources, develop alliances, and increase their influence (Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano 2015; Weerawardena and Mort 2012). Hunger Task Force, for example, established the Hunger Relief Federation of Wisconsin, a statewide coalition of Wisconsin hunger-relief organizations working together to share ideas, resources, and data to address hunger. Emma (Hunger Task Force) explained, “We formed a coalition [Hunger Relief Federation] to empower each other … learn from each other … be part of something bigger.” Milo (No Kid Hungry) highlighted the benefit of a statewide coalition: Every community is unique, but we can connect people with similar needs through peer mentoring and we can bring them together through [networking initiatives]. Impact, real change, starts with strong relationships. Developing a wide network of relationships in a state helps to broaden impact. This includes state partner agencies, schools, government.
Community-based nonprofits often scale wide by forming networks to share learning and practices related to their mission focus (Bradach and Grindle 2014). For example, CCI helps community and nonprofit leaders embedded in New York City neighborhoods connect in order to share program ideas each can customize to address criminal justice challenges in their own communities. Several community justice nonprofits, including BCJC and Brooklyn Justice Initiative, work together with other community-based nonprofits such as the Laundromat Project and Recess Art in a relationship network convened by CCI. This network of organizations designs collaborative programs that advance psychological well-being and reduce social, educational, and economic inequities to create social impact. For these community-based nonprofits, being geographically dispersed within New York reduces competitive forces, making them more likely to share both their failures and successes to enhance learning within the network. One reason nonprofits see sharing as a valuable investment of their time and resources is because it builds camaraderie through common cause, fueling passion and reducing potential burnout by reminding them they are not working alone. Sharing experiences within a relationship network builds resilience within the group (Jang 2017).
Weld a Collaborative Structure
While relationship networks may begin informally, growing structured networks designed to coordinate and facilitate sharing is vital to scaling wide. Establishing a structured network to amplify individual community and partner efforts is critical as “network theories emphasize the normative and social structure in which exchanges are embedded as the primary determinant of behavior” (Achrol and Kotler 1999, p. 146). Furthermore, successful knowledge networks require collaboration and active management (Achrol 1997). Formalizing networks to coordinate and facilitate systematic sharing increases the accountability members feel toward others in the group and accelerates sharing (Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder 2002). For example, Emma (Hunger Task Force) discussed a Charter of Rights endorsed by members of the Hunger Relief Federation, explaining that, through this partnership agreement, “our work group’s goals and objectives become more formalized.” Beyond collaborations within the state, Hunger Task Force collaborates with a national partner, No Kid Hungry, which convenes organizations throughout the United States to engage in similar forms of best practice sharing.
Organizations must identify conveners or leaders, as well as resources, to implement structure in a relationship network. The School Breakfast Institute, an initiative of No Kid Hungry, offers an example of leaders implementing formalized structure. This initiative brings together community-based anti-hunger organizations to share research, funding opportunities, and best practices for implementing school breakfast programs. No Kid Hungry acts as a “convener,” bringing together community-based nonprofits. Similarly, CCI in New York convenes monthly meetings for its partner nonprofits at which research and resources are shared. Avelene (Brooklyn Justice Initiative) explains, CCI serves as a convener of regular meetings, peer-to-peer idea sharing … but they also provide technical assistance, research to support program development on a local level. CCI has a robust research program that helps all of us. Finally, they connect us to nationwide programs/idea sharing and research on community court initiatives.
Without the time, resources, and staff dedicated to developing and nurturing a relationship network, the network may struggle to survive and thrive.
Write, Assemble, and Share a Marketing Toolkit
Relationship networks can share marketing toolkits for members of the group to use and customize in managing their nonprofits, promoting programs, and delivering services. Networks focused on a specific cause frequently share customizable marketing resources such as program documents, promotional materials, direct mail pieces, email templates, marketing samples, and strategies and ideas for how to use social media and storytelling to accomplish key goals and win support. Sharing these marketing resources requires digital space and management to organize and maintain virtual sharing networks. For example, when Hunger Task Force convenes a meeting of the Hunger Relief Federation, members bring materials to share: marketing materials, design files, direct mail, and appeal letters, but also strategies, intake surveys, and measurement tools to assess program impact. Materials are then banked, and as Emma (Hunger Task Force) noted, “Everyone has access to our resource library.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunger Relief Federation met weekly to share information about grants and resources. Emma describes this process: In the beginning, there were a lot of unknowns. While we have experience dealing with emergencies, none of us had ever experienced anything like this. We were able to share policies about mask wearing, resources to promote new programs like the Farm to Families Food Boxes, and ideas for how to execute it safely. As the pandemic stretched on, the federal government responded with changes to SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and WIC [Women, Infants, and Children], but we had to get that information out in both rural and urban communities. We shared email examples, flyers, and links to our online COVID-19 response resources trying to get the most up-to-date information to families in need of food. We helped connect state agencies with schools and families affected by remote learning who were eligible for Pandemic EBT [Electronic Benefits Transfer]. There were many new funding opportunities, and we were in a position to not just share the opportunity but to work collaboratively to write regional grants to secure funding.
Similar to what Achrol (1997) identifies as an opportunity network, Hunger Relief Federation (HRF) collects and distributes marketing information. In addition, HRF organizes network partners who share resources and materials, helping each other manage their organizations (e.g., worker and volunteer policy templates, board training resources, and self-audit checklists). This form of sharing increases access to marketing expertise throughout the system, enhancing the efficiency of the entire network, especially within a formalized alliance or relationship network (Gulati 1998). The knowledge accumulated by the network results in enhanced outcomes that “ripple out to unanticipated stakeholders in unexpected ways” (Rossi, Rosli and Yip 2017, p. 7).
Work Synergistically to Increase Capacity
The fusion of community-based nonprofits’ diverse solutions to tackle a societal challenge, together with their unique knowledge and individualized skill sets, allows relationship network partners to achieve outcomes that exceed what they could otherwise accomplish on their own (Achrol 1997; Achrol and Kotler 1999; Waitzer and Paul 2011). By scaling wide, nonprofits participating in relationship networks build capacity to tackle mission-critical issues. As Marina (Mural Arts) explained, “We want to work in collaboration with local programs to increase capacity.” Especially for new or small nonprofits, finding the right mix of talent—for example, marketing staff who can tell the organization’s story and development staff to generate sufficient funding—presents a challenge. Knowledge networks succeed when trust, communication, and coordination facilitate sharing that strategically fills organizational skill gaps (Chen, Hsiao, and Chu 2014). Within the Hunger Relief Federation, member organizations collaborate with each other not only to share ideas but also to leverage resources more efficiently. For example, neighboring member organizations may share food resources to minimize fresh food waste or collaborate on grant initiatives, especially in more rural areas of the state. Within the CCI collaborative, Brooklyn Justice Initiative collaborates with Recess Art, for example, by referring clients to Recess Art’s community arts internship program. According to Ronnie (Recess Art), Center for Court Innovation (CCI) is a group open to and doing more creative approaches to diversion programs, solving the problem of mass incarceration. Doing good work to decrease trauma. They served as a wedge that made an opening, creating shared connections to key stakeholders in this space, a “foot in the door.”
By leveraging the resources of the network, nonprofits increase their capacity for impact not only in their communities but also within the cause space regionally.
Widen the Collective Social Impact
Beyond strengthening outcomes for community-based nonprofits, acting as a collective increases the power and visibility of a relationship network, amplifying its potential to accelerate social impact (Barringer and Harrison 2000). For example, Emma (Hunger Task Force) describes the work of the Hunger Relief Federation: “With unity in the state, we are strong with one voice to advocate for programs and change…. When we organize to act as a group, we have more power to shift policy.” Wheatley and Frieze (2011) note how ideas and initiatives gain power as they coalesce within a network, noting, “When they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level” (p. 3).
With that power, network collectives can increase visibility for a cause, advocate for large-scale policy change within governmental and social systems, and offer the communities they represent a voice on a much larger scale. Noah (Project Row Houses) explains, You can’t divorce policy from community initiatives such as Black Lives Matter. In the Landbank 3rd Ward district, 23% of land owned is local but housing allocations differ. Policy should include land allocation in planning and design, consider tax implications, and TIR [reinvestment] districts to support nonprofit efforts.
As Achrol and Kotler (1999, p. 146) suggest, “Marketing outcomes increasingly are decided by competition between networks of firms rather than by competition among firms.” Shifting to view peers as collaborators rather than competitors for funding changes both the mindset of the network and potentially its ability to access resources to grow impact. Katie (Laundromat Project) explains how a group of nonprofits, including Laundromat Project, worked together to win grants: “You must figure out how to collaborate and think with a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.” As members of a collective, community-based nonprofits are no longer a lone organization competing for attention and funding but rather are part of a network, with the agency and power to attract greater resources and offer broader social impact.
When to Scale Wide
Community-based nonprofits scale wide when they have the funding, organizational capacity, and documentation of processes to expand. In describing Mural Arts’ process for “helping to build networks and share learning,” Marina explained that Mural Arts scales wide when it “identifies partners, builds a network of people, finds a common language, shares and customizes ideas, and builds infrastructure.” Through the knowledge networks formed in scaling wide, scaling-deep insights proliferate. Scaling wide is therefore best suited for those community-based nonprofits that have found success in their local communities and are looking to share their success with like-minded organizations for increased social impact. The following case study provides an in-depth illustration of when and how to scale wide.
Scaling-Wide Case Study: Mural Arts Philadelphia (MAP)
Thirty-five-year-old Mural Arts Philadelphia (MAP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the principle that “art ignites change,” is a model for how participatory art experiences can transform communities (Mural Arts 2019). MAP grew from a one-person initiative of Philadelphia’s city government into a nonprofit that has stewarded the creation of more than 4,000 collaborative, community-based works of art throughout the city. It scales deep in Philadelphia by connecting with community stakeholders, actively listening and building bridges within communities, establishing shared space in neighborhoods, cocreating collaborative community-based art initiatives, delivering iterations of success, and providing communities with access to resources and opportunities. Over the years, MAP’s efforts have received widespread interest from government officials, policy makers, nonprofits, artists, and researchers around the world that want to learn from MAP’s process and adapt its methods in their own communities. MAP scales wide by sharing its knowledge, methods, and practices with change agents across the globe. In the words of Jane Golden, MAP’s Executive Director, “When we share resources, there’s nothing that’s out of reach” (Ao 2018).
For MAP, activating and forming relationships is the first step in scaling wide. Community-based nonprofits that want to learn from MAP often have specific goals related to issues such as criminal justice reform, behavioral health, or community revitalization. Understanding their goals can help MAP place them in a relationship forum ranging from a workshop on muralism to a consultative approach featuring community-to-community mentoring. Through its Mural Arts Institute, MAP works with nonprofit organizations in Akron, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Memphis, Tennessee to cultivate supportive environments in which art can be leveraged to transform communities. Over time, MAP has found that its programs are not replicable but, rather, that the practices its programs are based on are transferrable.
MAP’s Mural Arts Institute has embarked on community-to-community mentoring with extended relationships in other cities. Building from its experience scaling deep in Philadelphia, navigating government bureaucracy and securing community funding partners, MAP not only provides program development ideas and support but also shares a wealth of knowledge regarding how to win support from key stakeholders and move participatory art initiatives forward. Using an organized and collaborative structure, MAP’s Porch Light program teaches communities how to use socially engaged, participatory art to generate positive behavioral health outcomes designed to heal a community (Ansell et al. 2013). Through its toolkit for the Porch Light program, Painting a Healthy City, MAP transfers knowledge it has refined to policy entities, nonprofits, and community leaders in other locations, while encouraging these communities to adapt programs and materials to fit local needs (Ansell et al. 2013). For example, the Porch Light marketing toolkit shares a wide array of support materials and resources nonprofits can use to customize their own local programs.
MAP serves a convening leadership role in its relationship networks by providing formal and informal training to communities, nonprofits, and project leaders who are building an arts infrastructure in their own communities. Efforts to proliferate and advance MAP’s success take many forms: delivering workshops on mural methods, training artists, and developing and sharing case studies about how community-based, participatory art reduces violence and decreases recidivism while increasing employment. MAP learns from its relationship partners, bringing back ideas and practices that help the organization continue the process of scaling deep in Philadelphia. Together, they develop and participate in synergistic collaborative groups both within Philadelphia but also nationally and internationally that increase the capacity for “arts to ignite change” (Mural Arts 2019). MAP’s mission makes it clear that although art is its medium, social change is its goal: “Our work is created in service of a larger movement that values equity, fairness, and progress across all of society” (Mural Arts 2019). Its scaling-deep approach to Philadelphia’s problems has attracted requests from communities around the world working to address similar challenges, expanding the collective social impact through scaling wide.
Discussion
A recent Bridgespan Report asserts that the world needs nonprofits with innovative solutions that are poised to grow on a scale required to address society’s most pressing problems (Ditkoff et al. 2018). We focus research attention on this vital issue and build a framework for community-based nonprofit organizations to scale social impact using marketing tools. Our framework offers a conceptual and practical contribution with the potential to make a positive difference in the world. Specifically, our research offers a path for scaling community-based nonprofit solutions to address societal problems: a two-stage T-shaped Scaling framework. By first scaling deep to identify stakeholders, establish trust, cocreate solutions, and deepen relationships in a locality, nonprofits create social impact in a community. Then, by leveraging these efforts in new communities and connecting with other organizations addressing similar challenges, these organizations scale wide across communities, cities, and localities. Together, scaling deep and scaling wide create a T-shaped Scaling strategy that grows social impact.
Our research answers the call in JPP&M for more research in marketing to increase social impact (Stewart 2013; Wilkie and Moore 2003) and the call for theory-building research to advance our understanding of market growth strategies in the social sector (Morgan et al. 2019). First, our advancement of T-shaped Scaling extends current marketing theory on scaling strategies by developing an alternative strategy for scaling community-based nonprofits. Community-based nonprofits struggle to scale by replicating in a new location. We investigate an alternative approach to scaling social impact by community-based nonprofits that involves recognizing the need for customized solutions anchored in a particular locality. As Noah (Project Row Houses) advises, scaling deeply within a community grows social change: Housing is a huge problem. Keep your focus. Funders want to reach more families, but they may be missing the point. Quality and support [are] more important than quantity. Focus on one community at a time, live your values. Working [within] a clear context of place is key to success.
T-shaped Scaling allows nonprofits to achieve impact by embedding deeply within a community and identifying, connecting with, and leveraging local resources to address problems situated within a community, and then transferring the learning among communities to maximize impact.
Second, we offer conceptual and practical contributions to scaling. Research has shown that nonprofits face more complex managerial challenges than those faced by companies in the business sector (Andreasen 2012). Nonprofits benefit from enduring relationships that allow for valuable exchange outcomes (Barrios and Blocker 2015), as well as from cocreating solutions (Boenigk et al. 2021) and operating in networks (Weerawardena and Mort 2012). Building on this foundation, our research extends findings on nonprofit growth strategies by delineating the processes required for scaling deep (e.g., relationship building and cocreation) and scaling wide (e.g., formalizing cooperative networks). Our process of T-shaped Scaling may be especially pertinent for community-based nonprofits operating within underserved communities that lack adequate access to resources (Shultz et al. 2012).
We also connect scaling deep to scaling wide to innovate T-shaped Scaling as a strategic process for community-based nonprofits to grow their impact. Nonprofits can scale wide by forming relationship networks with intentionality and structure, enabling them to share the insights gained via scaling deep. The key practices we identify for scaling wide purposefully guide nonprofits on how to extend their marketing practices beyond their community of origin, broadening social impact. Transitioning from scaling deep to scaling wide occurs when an organization takes a leadership role to convene and coordinate a network of organizations and the collective resources they build. In our research, we found nonprofits that undertake this role on a local (e.g., BCJC, COA), regional (e.g., CCI, Hunger Task Force), and national (e.g., Mural Arts Institute, No Kid Hungry) level. The role of network coordinator requires significant time and resources. Web Appendix C provides a case study of Hunger Task Force as it assumes this leadership role and transitions from scaling deep to scaling wide, enacting T-shaped Scaling.
Public Policy Implications
Local, state, and federal governments often work to identify community-based nonprofits with promising solutions to pressing societal problems and then try to help them scale their organizations using public funds (Roob and Bradach 2009). Consider how the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which provided $350 billion in COVID-19 pandemic relief to people and organizations, including nonprofits, contributed to emergency scaling of Wisconsin’s hunger-relief efforts. Using ARPA funding, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection issued a Request for Proposals calling for strategies to scale food distribution to hungry people in urban and rural Wisconsin communities. Hunger Task Force’s T-shaped Scaling—its scaled-deep efforts in urban Milwaukee together with the statewide Hunger Relief Federation in rural counties—provided the needed distribution network. After being awarded ARPA funds, Hunger Task Force invested in refrigerated trucks, coolers, and pallet jacks for the Hunger Relief Federation, fortifying the operational capacity of Wisconsin’s emergency food system. A second round of funds was used to purchase food, which was then distributed through the Hunger Relief Federation’s network of food pantries. Federal funding for this Wisconsin-led hunger-relief effort supported scaling by a community-based nonprofit and offers a concrete example of how collaboration, relationship building, and the practice of committed multiround government funding can contribute to the public good.
Funding models indicate that substantial government funding is essential for scaling community-based nonprofits (Bradach and Grindle 2014; Roob and Bradach 2009). Our research suggests that governmental policy, regulation, and funding should incentivize local innovation and collaborative nonprofit networks. The knowledge-sharing networks that are vital for scaling wide require conveners, collaboration centers, and resources to support sharing. Milo (No Kid Hungry) calls for governmental funding and programs to support community-based nonprofits: Research is needed to assess the impact of legislative solutions, create awareness of the problem, and develop a federal advocacy [team] and a state advocate team. These networks can collaborate [on] measures to assess if programs are working (e.g., school breakfast correlated with absenteeism), test different models to identify the best outcomes, collect multiyear impact measures at the state and local level.
Policy makers and funding entities must adapt to a new paradigm for scaling social impact that will require them to (1) offer flexibility in identifying the people and organizations that pioneer social impact programs; (2) create incentives for experimentation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing; and (3) reinvent funding models to generate programs and ideas that scale social impact on a local level within communities and on a broader level between and among communities.
Policy makers, governmental agencies, and other funders want to see results, often in the form of social impact through large-scale operations, before awarding funding (Martin and Osberg 2007). Yet, a lack of funding is a primary hindrance to the success of nonprofits (Janus and Threlfall 2016). For organizations that scale deep, these policy and funding entities with financial, regulatory, and political power often view a community-based nonprofit’s ability to create impact as limited. However, we encourage policy makers and funders to look at community-based nonprofits that are scaling deep with fresh eyes. Policy makers and funders should fund and empower nonprofits that are scaling deep and wide to innovate solutions for a broad array of complex societal issues. By referencing their plan to enact T-shaped Scaling, nonprofit managers now have a tractable path for communicating with funders regarding how scaling deep creates social impact. Finally, acknowledging that funding for T-shaped Scaling is critical, and echoing Ditkoff et al. (2018), we call for the formation of a Community Foundation for America to provide funding to community-based scaling-deep efforts and the scaling-wide networks that transfer their learning among localities.
Public policy must help develop infrastructure to facilitate scaling wide. Community-based nonprofits achieve more through cooperation than through competition. Thus, policy must foster cooperation by adjusting funding protocols and evaluation metrics. For example, metrics for success could be broadened to include the number of community-based organizations working together or the degree to which these organizations share expertise, materials, and insights to help other nonprofits. Finally, policy that supports the systematic solicitation of participant feedback has the potential to improve nonprofit initiatives. We advocate for active listening and participant feedback in our scaling framework, as monitoring these offers quick and inexpensive insight into program effectiveness (Benitez et al. 2022). In line with Benitez et al. (2022), our research suggests that governmental policy should incentivize community-based nonprofits to engage community members.
Directions for Future Research
This research pioneers a framework to guide community-based nonprofits as they scale their operations to increase social impact. This framework is designed to be generative and broaden research in marketing. Although we elaborate on a several research directions here, Table 2, Panels A and B, highlights more possibilities for future research organized by the dimensions of our framework. A critically important area for future research is the development of metrics to enable nonprofits that scale deep to assess their impact and then demonstrate that impact to funders, donors, and government agencies. Metrics that typically assess the impact of scaling for-profit businesses (e.g., sales, growth, profit) are often ineffective for assessing social impact scaling. Measures of nonprofit impact and effectiveness should include the ability to build partnerships and networks to accomplish impact goals (Bacon 2005). Lecy, Schmitz, and Swedlund (2012) note that there is a significant research gap on how to measure the effectiveness of nonprofits. Importantly, quantitative metrics do not tell the full story of a nonprofit’s impact; sharing the faces and voices of people who have experienced that impact can be much more powerful than numbers and statistics (Bublitz et al. 2016).
Future Research Scaling Deep and Wide.
Our research investigates U.S. community-based nonprofits; however, scaling is vital internationally. Just as U.S. nonprofits must deeply understand local community needs, so too must nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe. For example, NGOs serving refugees must understand their challenges and circumstances to design effective and humane solutions.
2
While we interviewed U.S. nonprofits, the principles outlined in T-shaped Scaling also apply to international locations. Future research must explore scaling strategies for NGOs across the world. In particular, scaling wide in an international context, for example, adapting and sharing marketing toolkits, presents challenges including language, culture, and access to technology. However, there are organizations working to overcome these barriers. Consider, for example, the With and For Girls Collective, an Africa-rooted fund for girl activists across the globe that provides resources to girl activists, not just with funding, but also by curating learning in physical and virtual exchange spaces to support girl-to-girl cocreation across organizations, countries, and continents. According to Executive Director Swatee Dipak, When young people come together, girls come together, when communities come together—and when they also connect with other movements, spaces, organizations, and connect with others nationally, regionally, and transnationally around the world—their demand feels so powerful…. It’s about recognizing expertise, that value, that strength, those ideas that we are always looking for, those silver bullets, actually already exist in communities but just haven’t been given any space to wield that power. They are already incredible, but they don’t have the access to the resources, the networks, or spaces of power.
T-shaped Scaling offers a framework that allows innovative community-based nonprofit solutions to proliferate and flourish by establishing strong roots through scaling deep and cultivating and nurturing verdant ideas and practices via scaling wide. We call on researchers in marketing to continue investigating social impact scaling and the marketing practices supporting it in an effort to use marketing to deepen and broaden social impact and, in turn, diminish poverty, hunger, racial inequity, and other injustices.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-ppo-10.1177_07439156221087997 - Supplemental material for Scaling Social Impact: Marketing to Grow Nonprofit Solutions
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ppo-10.1177_07439156221087997 for Scaling Social Impact: Marketing to Grow Nonprofit Solutions by Gia Nardini, Melissa G. Bublitz, Caitlin Butler, Staci Croom-Raley, Jennifer Edson Escalas, Jonathan Hansen and Laura A. Peracchio in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the editorial team, who asked hard questions to help them shape this article. They also thank Ron Hill and Beth Vallen, who provided feedback on this article. Special thanks to Lynn Stuart, the designer of Figure 1, and Priscilla Pardini, for copyediting the manuscript. Finally, the authors thank the nonprofit leaders who partnered with them to develop the T-shaped Scaling framework. These leaders are working on the front lines to create positive social impact in our communities and beyond.
Editor
Maura L. Scott
Associate Editor
Stacey Baker
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Summary of Relevant Scaling Research
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| Achrol (1997) | Integrated networks of organizations are key to organizational growth. These networks increase synergy and access to knowledge. |
| Achrol and Kotler (1999) | Structured networks of organizations determine interorganizational sharing behaviors. A more structured network of organizations increases strength and performance in the marketplace. |
| Bloom (2009) | To scale an effective solution, organizations must have staffing, communication, alliance building, lobbying, earnings generation, and replication effectiveness, as well as effectiveness in encouraging private interests that serve the public good. |
| Bloom (2012) | Social entrepreneurs desire to scale their organizations through serving more people in more places and effecting policy change. Marketing theory can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of scaling efforts. |
| Bublitz, Peracchio, et al. (2019) | Effective social entrepreneurial organizations exist within a supportive ecosystem that facilitates their development and growth. Scaling starts with embedding deeply within a community to achieve impact but proliferates when leaders network with like-minded social entrepreneurs. |
| Epstein and Yuthas (2012) | Scaling education interventions involves delivering education to increasing numbers of children with spread, depth, sustainability, and ownership. To scale successfully, education interventions must have content and delivery efficacy, replication efficacy, and motivation and energy. |
| Epstein and Yuthas (2017) | Measuring and improving social impact involves deciding what to invest, what problem to address, what steps to take, how to measure success, and how to increase impact. |
| Zook and Allen (2011) | Business growth in the form of scaling up requires a repeatable business model. |
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| Bloom (2021) | Community development expands through the spiraling up theory of change. Fostering community relationships is a vital component in increasing capacity through spiraling up. |
| Emery and Bregendahl (2014) | Relationship building and collaboration are paramount to successful community change initiatives. However, these relationships are complex, and they take substantial time and money to develop. Without the proper supporting infrastructure, collaboration breaks down. To build a support structure for relationship building, community change initiatives must foster trust, alignment, intentionality, diversity, readiness, and persistence. |
| Emery and Flora (2006) | Bonding social capital entails building community cohesion through strong community ties, whereas bridging social capital entails strengthening ties between external organizations and communities. Fostering both bonding and bridging social capital contribute to community capital and enable change via the Community Capitals Framework. |
| Eversole (2010) | Attaining authentic participation from community members for social change requires external partners to become participants; they must become insiders. Locals have situated knowledge whereas experts may offer formal knowledge. Situated knowledge is grounded in place and context; thus, situated knowledge enables authentic participation in community development. |
| Gutierrez-Montes, Emery, and Fernandez-Baca (2009) | Both the Community Capitals Framework and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach offer approaches for expanding poverty reduction across communities. While both approaches emphasize the importance of synergy among capitals, such as social, human, natural, financial, and built capitals, the Cultural Capitals Framework also incorporates cultural and political capitals. Nevertheless, both approaches are people-centered and participatory; focus on existing capitals and resources versus needs and problems in a community; and train people rather than providing recipes to empower people. |
| Mandell (2010) | Social change begins locally through creating social bonds within neighborhoods and building bridges to neighboring communities. These social bonds support effective community organizing, civic participation, and resident empowerment. |
| Markley, Lyons, and Macke (2015) | This framework focuses on building the capacity of both individual entrepreneurs and a community’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Community transformational outcomes, such as stronger community capital, emerge from the development of both entrepreneurial and community capacity. |
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| Bercovitz and Mitchell (2007) | Both business scale and scope benefit long-term survival because of the increased availability of financial resources, organizational routines, and external ties. Business scale is conceptualized as annual sales revenue and business scope as product-line breadth. |
| Bloom and Chatterji (2009) | An organization’s ability to scale, which involves serving more people, and improve social impact outcomes depends on its ability to develop capabilities outlined in the SCALERS model: staffing, communication, alliance building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating, and stimulating market forces. |
| Bolzan, Bitencourt, and Martins (2019) | Broadening impact requires organizations to extend their reach, which is referred to as scaling out; comprehensive change comes in the form of legislation and public policy, which is referred to as scaling up. Expanding an innovation in its place of origin is termed scaling deep. |
| Ebrahim and Rangan (2014) | Social performance is measured through the activities that address the organization’s operational mission, including the scale—or reach—of organizational activities, and the scope—or range—of those activities. |
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| Bloom and Smith (2010) | Empirical test of the SCALERS model developed by Bloom in 2009. |
| Bradach and Grindle (2014) | Scaling up requires distribution through an existing network; recruitment and training of other organizations; disaggregation of high-impact elements; leveraging technology; strengthening the network; changing public systems; influencing policy change; adopting a for-profit model; and altering attitudes, behaviors, and norms. |
| Dees, Anderson, and Wei-Skillern (2004) | Spreading social innovation entails replicating a successful model to reach more people. To do this, organizations must consider whether the innovation is ready to be spread, whether it will be well-received in the new community, what resources are required for replication, what risks are involved, and what returns are possible from successful replication. |
| Moore, Riddell, and Vocisano (2015) | Systems change is likely to require a combination of scaling out, which involves impacting laws and policy; scaling up, which involves impacting greater numbers of people or communities; and scaling deep, which involves impacting cultural roots. All three scaling approaches require effective network building. |
| Trelstad and Katz (2011) | Scale is a function of the size of a network. The path to scale for nonprofit organizations depends largely on how clear the organization’s mission is and how well the organization demonstrates that it can be trusted to convert its funding and volunteers’ time into the desired social or environmental outcome. |
| Uvin and Miller (1996) | There are various forms of scaling up, which all entail the growth in size, number, and range of activities. Quantitative scaling up entails spread, replication, horizontal aggregation, and integration. Functional scaling up entails horizontal integration and vertical integration. Political scaling up entails information and mobilization, networking, vertical aggregation, and direct entry into policies. Organizational scaling up entails diversifying funding sources, increasing self-financing, promoting skills development, creating institutional variety, and maintaining participation and accountability. |
| Waitzer and Paul (2011) | Rather than a top-down enterprise approach to scale, social entrepreneurs must develop an ecosystem of decentralized networks that build from the bottom up. |
| Weber, Kröger, and Lambrich (2012) | For social enterprises to grow, they must have a scalable business model that allows for replicability, adaptability, and transferability. |
| Westley et al. (2014) | There are various pathways for scaling social innovation, moving from social to institutional entrepreneurship, based on five different configurations of the organization’s approach to change, its strengths and special advantages, challenges in facing system-level goals, pathways for scaling up, and risks of each pathway. |
References
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