Thinking strategically about scaling up impact. CEO of Spring Impact, Dan Berelowitz, joins Alberto Lidji to talk about helping charities scale up while ensuring quality and impact

Spring Impact is a registered charity in the UK and a 501(c)(3) in the USA. They help other charities and innovative organisations of various sizes and degrees of experience to scale up, replicate and increase their impact.

Dan sheds light on his professional trajectory and highlights how he learned a great deal by observing the likes of McDonald’s and Oxfam.

Unlike many commercial advisory firms, Spring Impact is happy to share their intellectual property (IP) so that others can learn from their processes and strategies. They publish a ‘Social Replication Toolkit’ that is publicly available and transfers insight to anyone who’s interested in learning more.

Interestingly, Spring Impact often works with organisations that are already well on their scalability journey – not just nascent ventures.  For instance, Dan noted Spring Impact works with several Skoll Awardees.

Spring Impact is also deploying much attention to drive forward the field of early childhood development (ECD). They have helped many clients in this space and are now looking at how they might be able to create toolkits and processes that would be of use to any ECD organisations looking to increase their reach.

Dan explains how they work with charity Boards and CEOs and, also, he notes that oftentimes the funding for their work actually comes from third party Foundations that have identified a specific charity in need of gaining scale and, consequently, they approach Spring Impact and fund their work in support of the charity in question.

Dan’s key takeaway: Keeping in mind the current COVID-19 backdrop, he notes that, yes, do think about emergency response and risk but, also, go ahead and hold your head up to the possibilities to really expand and create more impact. Once we’re in recovery mode post-pandemic, you should really think systematically and strategically about scale.

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