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Social Entrepreneurs' Tricky Issues of Sustainability and Scale
Social Entrepreneurs' Tricky Issues of Sustainability and Scale
Social Entrepreneurs' Tricky Issues of Sustainability and Scale
We don’t just make products or deliver services; we’re supposed to generate real impact on complex
societal problems. As often as not, these are problems that can’t be solved with simple modular widgets
that can be sold in ever‐increasing quantities. To tackle these problems we have to develop multi‐
faceted approaches with a lot of human intervention. We invest enormous time and energy
understanding our first customers, working side‐by‐side with them, tweaking and changing what we
provide them and often waiting a very long time to see any measurable social change.
That kind of work embodies the phrase “high touch” and it flies in the face of that conventional
definition of scalability. The results are phenomenal but come with the definite possibility that every
new customer will require a proportional increase in our infrastructure. Therefore, for social ventures,
our search for scalability is a search for the definition of what works, for procedures and interventions
that can be replicated — perhaps still with high‐energy investment, but in a consistent way in each new
place to generate consistent impact.
Sustainability has come to hold two meanings for social enterprises. The first refers, as usual, to the
soundness of our organizations’ financial footing. The people who pay for a social venture’s services are
not always the same as those who use them. From a practical standpoint, this doubles our
organizations’ workload as we pursue the work to provide our products or services plus the work to
secure the funding for those products and services. More recently, revenue‐generating models have
become the ideal; everyone is searching for a way to survive without perpetual philanthropic infusions.
There are organizations that price their products for their (generally poor) clients and generate funds
like any other manufacturer of goods, only with the added plus of making a difference through what
they sell. Other organizations look for offshoots of their social work that can be monetized and
marketed. The tension between mission and financial urgency can be acute. We must be vigilant about
not over‐charging the very people we are trying to help, or spending so much time generating a saleable
product that the social impact for our clients declines.
The second definition of sustainability refers to the durability of that social benefit. It’s wonderful to
work in a community and improve lives, but what happens once we’ve moved on to the next site? Can
our clients maintain what we’ve started or will our constant presence and intervention be required? This
issue feeds back into our development of models that scale. We may have to add entirely new programs
to our original simple offering to ensure that our efforts have lasting benefits.
These then are the questions I wrestle with on an almost daily basis: Can we distill the lessons of
all these years of intensive work and arrive at protocols we can more easily replicate in new
locations? How do we measure the magnitude of our social impact and ensure it lasts beyond our
intervention? How do we generate the funds to support this work in ways that are themselves
scalable?
I believe we will be able to resolve these questions, and I believe we will realize our desired
social impact, but it will not be quick or easy. As social entrepreneurs we are often expected to
pursue these issues fueled only by hope and devotion. We must endlessly make the case for the
resources to crack these tough problems. That is not an easy case to make in an era in which you
can invest in a smartphone application that hits “scale” and significant revenues within a year.
But that kind of patient support in our enterprises will pay off. The problems we are tackling are
important. When we do resolve the issues of sustainability and scale, the results will be worth the
investment, and worth the wait.