Answer From: Alice Metcalf, Senior Consultant, Spring Impact
Long-term flexible funding and investing capacity building is so essential. We feel like
the social sector at the moment isn’t really set up to really enable solutions to be
impactful at scale, which makes it a difficult job to get the right funders on board.
But that said, in our experience, there are a few things that can support the funding that we want to see in relation to scale. And I think one of those essential things is relating to human cent to design, the ability and evidence to actually test your solution, and to be able to validate the demand for it.
Many organizations can be in the drawing room for a long time and create a solution
which, on paper seems like it’s going to be really valuable and really impactful, but
actually having those data points for how people have engaged and the real-world testing that you’ve done can be supportive of that.
The other one that we see also is, demonstrating some of those mindsets that we talked about. For example, demonstrating as an organization that you’re committed to
addressing a problem at scale, and your passion as an organization is within addressing a problem at scale rather than taking your solution to scale.
It is really difficult to say which fund is exactly what we think is needed for scale. But
hopefully that there are some helpful takeaways in there.
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