Giving Compass' Take:

• New Venture Fund and Tides make the argument for social impact platforms as a vehicle for nonprofits to maximize their potential. 

• Do social impact platforms make sense for organizations that you are involved with? What are the drawbacks to this format?

• Learn about platforms for scalable learning in the social sector.

When starting a new project or collaboration, choices about infrastructure are no less important than choices about strategies for impact. You can have the right ideas, people, and funding, but you also need an operational structure that can launch and sustain them. Funders and social change leaders increasingly realize that achieving change at scale will require working with partners across sectors and geographies more effectively than ever before.

Social impact platforms provide a solution to one of the longest-standing challenges dogging the nonprofit sector: the difficulty of accessing core operating support. There are more than 1.4 million nonprofits in the United States, most of which are small and sacrifice staffing and administrative capacity to demonstrate program impact to donors.

The increasing urgency to get to meaningful and measurable outcomes means changemakers across sectors are coming together to try to effect change via multiple levers. Yet these collaborations are time-consuming and intensive, requiring the management of multiple stakeholders with varying expectations, relationships, and capacities.

Every single collaborative looks different and has stakeholders with varying needs—some related to compliance and regulations and some related to tricky interpersonal and inter-organizational dynamics. Social impact platforms such as Tides and NVF provide a breadth of specialized services to facilitate these endeavors. In addition to providing a neutral platform for pooled funds, their staff members have designed and managed dozens of collaboratives.