Scaling Impact through INGOs
Humanitarian and environmental challenges are growing faster than our ability to solve them. Aid and philanthropic resources are shrinking. Time is running out. With just five years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we urgently need to rethink how we work.
Scaling our impact isn’t optional - it’s essential.
Scaling impact to meet the scale of the humanitarian and environmental challenges we face is one of the biggest questions INGOs are grappling with right now. There’s no single recipe, no one-size-fits-all pathway to transformational impact. Each organisation, each landscape, each project faces its own barriers and opportunities, shaped by context, mandate, and ambition.
What we do share is a commitment: to learn, to experiment, and to strengthen our ability to support initiatives to design and deliver for scale. This page is here for that purpose. A place to bring together insights, tools, and lived experiences from across our network.
The resources that follow have been curated by practitioners within the Innovation for Impact Network—teams across international NGOs who hold mandates related to innovation, impact acceleration, and scaling. They do not represent official positions or endorsed approaches of every organisation, nor a definitive picture of what each INGO is doing in practice. Instead, they reflect materials that members of the network have found useful in their own work and are shared here in the spirit of collective learning.
Basic Scaling Concepts
Scale isn't just another word for growth. Scale is about busting out of a linear trajectory into an ever-steepening - exponential, even - curve of impact over time. A scalable solution is one that has the potential to make a big dent in a big social problem, maybe even solve the whole thing.
Kevin Starr, Managing Director of the Mulago Foundation
Scaling is a nuanced and often-debated topic, with many theorists and organisations offering different definitions and approaches. The concepts below are synthesised from leading scaling thinkers and curated by the WWF Innovation team based on what they’ve found most useful when supporting innovations to scale.
Why Scaling Matters
Explore why business as usual isn’t enough to meet our goals.
Building Scalable Solutions
What makes something scalable?
What is Scaling Impact?
Learn what we really mean by scale; and why growing your organisation isn’t the same as scaling your impact.
Why Is Scaling So Hard?
Scaling impact is notoriously difficult. Let's unpack why.
Pathways to Scale
Explore the different routes impact can take and how your endgame shapes the path.
Scaling Enablers
What can we do to create a more enabling environment for scale?
How IFIN Members are approaching Scale
Every organisation approaches scaling in its own way: shaped by mission, structure, and experience. This section brings together how different INGOs are thinking about and supporting scale today.
DIY Scaling Tools, Frameworks & Courses
Here you’ll find a collection of tools and resources developed by, or used within, different INGOs to support scale. They’re organised by the specific scaling need they address, so you can quickly find what’s most relevant to your work.
Designing a solution for scale
Spring Impact: Scaling Toolkit
By who: Spring Impact, a social enterprise that supports mission-driven organisations to scale social impact.
Best for: Teams at any stage of the scaling journey—especially those looking for a structured, step-by-step process from design to execution. It’s ideal for teams who want a guided approach to developing and testing scalable models, including support on replication types, funding models, and readiness assessments.
USP: This is the most comprehensive and user-friendly toolkit available, guiding users through six stages—from understanding the problem to managing scale. It includes actionable worksheets, checklists, and a Scale Pathways worksheet to match your model to the right approach.
Scaling Value Playbook Toolkit
By who: John Bessant and Ian Gray
Best for: Project leaders and innovation teams seeking to design a networked approach to scale and sustain impact, with real-world examples and practical steps. Excellent for teams looking to understand how to build partnerships, networks, and support structures needed to grow impact beyond your direct reach.
What it offers: A playbook-style toolkit built for iterating through scaling challenges, combining diagnostic tools, system mapping, partnership guidance, and strategic design frameworks. Rich with examples and templates.
Strengthening your existing model for maximum scalability
Progress to Scale Framework by Elrha
By who: Elrha is an organisation supporting humanitarian innovation.
Best for: Teams in early-stage innovation or piloting, especially those who want to track progress over time and better understand how far along they are on the scaling journey.
USP: Offers a clear maturity framework across five stages of scaling. Focused on readiness and transition from idea to systemic uptake. Especially useful for communicating progress with funders or internal stakeholders.
Addressing the enabling conditions for Scale
Identifying the Scalable elements of a solution
PPPLab: Scaling Strategies for Systemic Change
By who: PPPLab (a Dutch learning initiative), focused on scaling in complex multi-stakeholder development settings.
Best for: Teams working in partnership-heavy or systems change contexts—especially those trying to influence markets, value chains, or policy environments. Helpful if your project is stuck between strategy and reality and you want to explore strategic tensions and adaptive scaling.
USP: Provides a realistic, systems-savvy lens on scaling, including 10 strategic scaling routes and the “Scaling Scan” tool to assess enabling conditions. Strong on the limitations and trade-offs of scaling in messy, real-world contexts.
Building a portfolio with the highest scale potential
By who: FOS (Future of Strategy), a strategy consultancy working in conservation and systems change.
Best for: Teams who want to reflect on the real-world conditions needed for successful scaling—especially those facing complex systems, fragmented efforts, or slow uptake of proven solutions.
USP: Provides a set of provocative statements (the “scaling challenge”) to spark honest conversations about what scaling really takes. Rather than presenting a how-to model, the tool reframes scaling as a testable challenge: “If this worked, why hasn’t it spread?” and identifies deeper blockers like incentives, resourcing, capabilities, and systems leadership. Designed to disrupt simplistic scaling assumptions and guide more grounded strategy.
IFIN Scaling Case Studies
The FSC
From a single FSC-certified wooden spatula in 1994 to a globally embedded certification system covering over 190 million hectares of forest and 60,000 supply-chain certificates, this case study shows how voluntary forest certification was scaled into a market-shaping, policy-influencing tool for global conservation impact.
SMART
From a hand-drawn idea shared by a small group of conservationists in 2011 to an open-source technology used in over 1,500 protected areas across 80+ countries, this case study shows how SMART scaled from a local fix for outdated monitoring tools into the world’s most widely adopted system for protected area management.
Key Scaling Articles & Reports
Articles by IFIN Members
Fundamentals of Scaling
How “scaling” means expanding impact efficiently—replicating and adapting solutions, influencing policy and culture—to drive bigger social and environmental change.
By Kate Garder
Lived Lessons on Scaling from IFIN’s Portugal Retreat
What innovation leaders from WWF, CARE, Save the Children, DanChurchAid, The Nature Conservancy, and beyond wish they’d known sooner about getting from pilot to real-world scale.
By Jessica Lynbeck
Other Resources
Not Invented, But Scaled Here
What big international NGOs—BINGOs—need to learn about growing external social enterprise solutions.
By Anita Sundari Akella
What’s Your Endgame?
By Alice Gugelev & Andrew Stern – Stanford Social Innovation Review (2015)
This influential article argues that scaling isn’t about getting bigger—it’s about knowing when you're no longer needed. It outlines six nonprofit “endgames” (e.g. government adoption, open source) and urges organisations to define their intended pathway to lasting impact early.OECD DAC Guidance on Scaling Development Outcomes (2024)
By OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC)
A comprehensive guide offering policy and operational insights for funders, implementers, and governments. It provides a structured approach to scaling development outcomes, including enabling conditions, entry points, and how donors can support sustainable scale.Strategy: Go Big or Go… Oh, Just Go Big
By Kevin Starr – Stanford Social Innovation Review, May 4, 2022
This article offers a clear, four-step strategy for scaling impact to match the size of complex global challenges. Starr emphasizes the importance of defining your Big Idea and Dream, identifying the Doer‑at‑Scale and Payer‑at‑Scale, designing a replicable operating model, and continually refining your strategy.Not Invented, but Scaled Here
By Anita Sundari Akella – Stanford Social Innovation Review (2023)
Akella makes the case for INGOs to act as scaling platforms—not by inventing new solutions, but by adopting and amplifying proven innovations developed elsewhere. It’s a call for humility, collaboration, and building scale through existing ecosystems.Pilots Never Fail, Pilots Never Scale
By Ian Johnson – NextBillion, originally based on CIMMYT research (circa 2018)
This in-depth article argues that while pilots often "succeed" in controlled environments, they almost never translate into scalable, sustainable programs. Johnson explains that pilots typically operate within a "greenhouse" protected from politics, markets, and systemic constraints, leading to outcomes that fail when removed from those conditions.
Multi-Org Scaling Hub
Members of the Innovation for Impact Network dedicated to advancing scaling within their organisations - including Jess Lybeck (TNC), Kate Gardner (WWF), Anne Merkle (WWF), Emma-lee Knape (UN World Food Programme), and Anita Akella (CARE) - are collaborating to strengthen scaling capacity across humanitarian, development, and environmental impact organisations.
This hub focuses on how organisations can build the knowledge, skills, and enabling conditions needed to support scaling. Current areas of work include:
Building organisational scaling know-how: developing shared concepts, terminology, and guidance so leaders and teams understand the structures, systems, and ways of working required to support impact at scale.
Supporting practitioners with execution capacity: helping project teams define scaling pathways and providing hands-on, entrepreneur-in-residence style support to fill capacity or knowledge gaps during implementation.
This hub is actively exploring what is possible from a multi-organisation perspective — identifying opportunities to reduce duplication, share learning openly, and strengthen collective scaling capability.
If you are working on similar questions or would like to join the conversation, please contact Jessica Lybeck at jessica.lybeck@tnc.org