Sustainability, Scaling and Evaluation Capacity Building

Over the next several months, I will be addressing three issues in this blog:

• Sustainability of successful services, resources & activities
• Bringing those successful elements to scale to meet the needs of the individual community college and their students
• Embedding evaluation capacity building in the the culture of the community college related to elements of Project IMPACT

In the past posts, I have added information about evaluation capacity building and sustainability. This post will discuss scaling, defined as "adapting a locally successful innovation to a wide variety of settings while retaining it effectiveness" (C. Dede et al, Scaling Up Success). Bloom defines it as "the process of closing the gap between the real and ideal conditions as they pertain to particular needs or problems" (P. Bloom, Scaling Your Social Venture). Sutton has a more poetic way of looking at scaling: "Scaling requires the wherewithal to hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now - the perpetual present tense that every person is trapped in - to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later" (R. Sutton, Scaling Up Excellence).

Bloom suggests that seven questions about organizational capabilities should be considered carefully (SCALERS):

• Staffing: Can you become effective at recruiting, training, organizing, managing, and retaining the additional employees, managers, volunteers and board members need to support scaling?
• Communicating: Can you become effective at configuring and delivering messages that persuade potential donors, employees, volunteers, partners, regulators and beneficiaries about the value of what you do?
• Alliance-Building: Can you become effective at forming partnerships and alliances with other parties and organizations that will allow you to leverage their resources and capabilities in addition to your own?
• Lobbying: Can you become effective at advocating with influential people and public policy makers for the changes you seek?
• Earnings-Generation: Can you develop a business model that will allow you to be financially sustainable?
• Replicating: Can you become effective at developing systems and procedures that facilitate replicating or repeating your successful interventions?
• Stimulating Market Forces: Can you become effective at using market incentives to encourage others to donate, buy, invest, volunteer, or otherwise behave in ways that benefit your venture?

As Project IMPACT moves into its third year, please consider the above seven questions - keep them in the back (or the front) of your mind. The grant money ends in a little over two years. What do you want to bring to scale and how will you accomplish it?