In an era of tech-enabled, high-growth social enterprises, it’s easy to overlook the large, slower-growth nonprofits with broad networks that have been serving communities for decades. Yet it’s these national and global networks that have the reach and power to take on big social issues and create impact at scale. Y-USA, 4-H, Save the Children, and The Salvation Army are just a handful of networks that have taken steps toward not only serving those in need, but solving the underlying social problems their beneficiaries face.

From our recent interviews with network leaders, we found two workable approaches: one anchors on measurable outcomes, the other on an evidence-based approach:

Anchoring on Measurable Outcomes

As a network governed by the leadership of local o ces and clubs, each 4-H club has its own academic ties and youth demography to consider. Yet, change management that anchored on outcomes allowed each club to choose its own programs while e ectively re-choreographing the network’s approach to advancing its mission. “National [leadership] created the environment for that to happen,” said Sirangelo. In a similar fashion, World Vision International, a 65-year-old relief and development network with partner operations in more than 90 countries, has used outcomes measurement to shape its pivot from relief work to community-based development.

Anchoring on an Evidence-Based Model

Another approach to managing change across a network follows that of the Y-USA: identifying evidence-based programs and o ering them to members with support from the central o ce to ensure adherence to the model. This is di erent than anchoring on outcomes as it prescribes a program, based on testing that has proven a certain approach works, versus targeting an outcome and asking members of a network to gure out how to achieve it. After the Y’s leadership saw an opportunity for the organization to play a role in helping students avoid summer learning loss, senior management began a search for programs that could improve summer learning outcomes and could be scaled across the Y’s network.

For most networks, building new organizational capacity to collect data, support sites, hire new sta , and train existing sta comes with a substantial price tag. And it comes with costs in sta time and e ort to shift mindsets
and forge agreement across a network. It also comes with serious demands of governance—either convincing boards of the need for costly change, or of a need to transform the board itself. Yet our exemplars overcame the di culties of funding costs and realigning governance in ways from which others can learn.

Whether the networks reinvent themselves as social innovators, or shoulder innovations developed by other social entrepreneurs, their leadership and involvement is critical.

Read the source article at The Bridgespan Group

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