Giving Compass' Take:

• This Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors report details how specific organizations and approaches have been able to scale solutions and produce systems change.

• One of the biggest takeaways is to improve collaboration and see grantees as partners. How can funders improve in this area? In what ways can we better understand the complexity of the issues we care deeply about?

• Here are three gotta-haves for boards seeking impact and scale.

Many funders are on a constant quest to have more impact — to be sure that the funds they deploy are making a meaningful difference. Over the last few years, funders have begun to focus more on their own practices, not just those of grantees, in scaling impact.

Practitioners and researchers are exploring:

  1. how funders must work with grantees and investees as true partners, not just recipients of funds and ideas,
  2. how to collaborate more and better with other funders in order to achieve greater impact, and
  3. how funders can gain a deeper understanding of the complex context in which their funds are used, and use that understanding to support grantees better. Related to this is a focus on shifting from funding individual projects to supporting more sustained, deeper-level transformations in society.

The Scaling Solutions Steering Group examined when, how, and why some organizations’ solutions have been able to grow at significant scale, and achieve the system-level shifts that they and their funders had anticipated. We wanted to know more about what internal and external factors have mattered most, and what roles funders and funding played in such cases.

As the Skoll Foundation notes, some organizations are creating innovation models to drive equilibrium change—the disruption of social, economic, and political forces that enable inequality, injustice, and other thorny social and environmental problems to persist.2 By disrupting the status quo, these organizations open up the space for solutions to take root, scale, and become the foundation of profound social transformation and a more peaceful and prosperous world. Many organizations today are helping to solve seemingly intractable problems, and demonstrating the possibility of moving beyond incremental change to real transformation. But their success rests in their ability to shift the complex systems in which those problems exist—and that is infuenced partly by how they are funded.

Read the full research article about scaling impact by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.