The 5 stages to social impact

1. Develop new programs

Social organisations face significant obstacles to achieving impact on limited budgets. Skilled and experienced staff are often over-stretched with immediate demands and don’t have spare time to do service development or documentation. Some of this is the duplication and inefficiencies inherent in poor systems, funder requirements and an (understandably) reactive culture. It’s also a specialised skill to design and build systems that work. Service design requires research, understanding of need and good depth of practitioner knowledge as well as an ability to accurately document the service model.

2. Test,  Learn & Prove

Social impact is best achieved when we deeply understand a need, develop programs and practices that are effective, we use data to prove their effectiveness but also to continually improve them with nuance. We don’t just need to know if an overall program works (the subject of formal program evaluations), we need to know what specific practices work for what people in what context over what time period. We can get even better data and learning if we join a data collaboration with other peer organisations in our sector so we can see the whole sector picture and compare methods and outcomes. And we need to nimbly adjust our practices to respond to this every changing live data.

3. Deliver quality with fidelity to model

But knowing what works isn’t enough. We have to be able to deliver that best practice with fidelity (consistently, accurately with a high quality service) across many diverse staff teams and with many individual clients. We need all staff to know exactly what the best practice for each task is (as practices keep evolving with new data this changes over time). They need to know what they need to do and how to adapt it to the varying needs of individual clients, but in an efficient way consistent with best practice. We need tools that enhance productivity, enable managers to identify risks, and make operational delivery of high quality.

4. Win funding to expand

If we can show we can consistently deliver a program and the evidence shows it makes a difference (that’s better than the next best alternative), then we make a strong case for funders to fund its expansion to new clients. With strong ability to achieve outcomes, we might even be able to contract with funders in an outcomes-based contract, where some of the money depends on us achieving the outcomes. This provides even more evidence of impact.

5. Scale & improve with partners

Once we have good evidence that our program or practice works, it’s time to think about scaling that impact further. There are many options to a scaling strategy, but one often overlooked method is to find partners in other jurisdictions who have good local teams to licence the service model to deliver in their location. This requires good practice documentation and tools that enable both smooth finding, partnering, contracting and licensing, but also ongoing monitoring and managed of the precious practice IP as it’s delivered in a new place.  

For these reasons, Latitude Network has developed methods and tools to support social organisations across this journey from identifying a need in the community to scaling methods that work. You can see these in the 5 stages graphic below the circles.

Strategic planning and operational planning is a good time to assess which stage your programs are at in this journey to impact. We've written a separate blog on the opportunity at this 5 year planning time at the end of 2025. Read here.