Leveling Up: A Guide to Scaling Your Initiative

Scaling refers to the gradual resizing of your initiative to match increased funding, volunteer interest, or institutional support. This can allow you to expand your initiative into new locations, branch out to a wider audience, or increase the volume of services offered. Scaling is a crucial aspect of developing any initiative, as it facilitates effective growth through careful planning and execution. Let’s take a look at the different stages of scaling to better understand the ins and outs of the process.

Identifying Need

The first step in scaling your initiative is assessing potential needs. Identifying needs allows you to leverage your recent acquisition of personnel, space, or finances where they are most needed. From there, you can begin designing your expanded program with input from your current team and participant base. Many community projects employ a logic model as they progress toward program expansion. Using a logic model entails examining your intended goals through the lens of internal actions and external outcomes, as demonstrated by this Community Project Growth Tool, which helps assess needs.

This all might sound a bit abstract, but in reality, it’s very straightforward. Let’s look at an example featuring the Community Project Growth Tool: If you were running a winter clothing drive in Bed-Stuy and were looking to expand into Crown Heights, you would consider the resources you needed (donated clothes, drop-off and pickup locations), the activities you were engaging in (giving donated clothes to people who needed them) and the end result of the activities (people lacking sweaters and coats being safer and more comfortable during winter). You would then measure these inputs against your goals over the course of your project’s projected future and see if the new location was feasible.

Potential Expansions

A common question in the early stages of scaling is “What will I have at the end of this?” The answer to that question is fairly simple. Most scaling looks like an expansion in the following areas:

• Service Locations - expanding the geographical reach of your initiative through new areas of service.
• Personnel - increasing the size of your team with new employees or volunteers.
• Service Offerings - adding new provided actions or items to your community initiative.

In more concrete terms, if you were running that clothing drive and you had a recent influx of funding (or benefited from a community partnership), you might choose to open a new location. Likewise, if you were managing a community youth health clinic and saw an uptick in volunteer support, you might expand your hours of operation or offer informational programming for a specific age range.

Training

Finally, once you’ve squared away the logistics, you can begin the real work of training your volunteers or employees, which can look different depending on the scenario. For brand new team members, you will want to make sure they are prepared for the service work they are doing to support the initiative. For existing workers, make sure they are up to date on your current services and the hours at your work locations (if applicable). Turning to our earlier examples, at the clothing drive, you should have previous employees aware of the potential to work in a new location and what information to provide about it. At the community health clinic, you would want to give new volunteers detailed instructions for the informational events they were hosting.

All of this can seem like a lot to manage, but the good news is that scaling is great for your initiative. It reflects your potential success and enables you to replicate or extend the services you provide to your community. Scaling, though daunting, is ultimately a reflection of the good work you’ve already done and will continue to do.

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One way to start working towards making an impact in your community is to contact local elected officials. Learn four practical tips for identifying your officials and connecting with them in your area.