How Small Groups Reach Millions

John Abbott/BELL

Building Educated Leaders for Life, or BELL, runs a program to halt the “summer slide” in math and reading — and even increases those skills.

The Y has long worked with millions of youths in summer programs for the same purpose, but none have matched BELL’s consistent success.

The two groups embarked on a partnership in 2011 in which BELL trains and certifies Ys throughout the country to deliver the BELL summer program. The Y partnership started small, but it is expected to reach 5,000 students at 70 sites this summer, accounting for more than a third of all students participating in the BELL program. Y officials hope to provide the program to 50,000 students by 2021 — and even that could be just a start for the Y, which serves 9 million children a year.

“In the back of our minds, the idea of bringing this program to millions is driving us,” says Rebecca Kelley, the national director of the Y’s programs to close the academic achievement gap. “We want to scale this really well.”

Many nonprofits have been experimenting for nearly two decades with taking high-performing programs “to scale.” The idea of expanding promising programs to serve exponentially larger groups of people has had its ups and downs since it burst onto the nonprofit scene 20 years ago as the next big thing.

For those that are sticking with the strategy, many are finding that a partnership with a larger organization is the best path to big results.

Jeffrey Bradach, co-founder of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting group in Boston that works with many fast-growing charities, says the right partnerships can help nonprofits achieve “transformative scale” — a term that distinguishes real progress from incremental gains.

BELL hopes eventually to reach enough low-income and minority students through the Y partnership to make a national impact on the achievement gap — even though the approach requires giving up some control and could jeopardize the consistency of BELL’s results.

“It’s saying, ‘This is not all about BELL — this is about impact,’” Mr. Bradach says.

The Right Fit

Other charities are also expanding successfully through partners.

VisionSpring, which sells low-cost eyeglasses in developing countries, started out by trying to create its own sales force of entrepreneurs. But the women who went door to door selling the glasses found it difficult to make a living.

Joel Collins/VisionSpring

So the charity began looking for existing organizations with built-in sales networks. BRAC, an antipoverty group in Bangladesh, had a sales force that was already distributing basic medicines and hygiene products. A partnership started with 50 women selling glasses, then increased to 500, then to 5,000. The charity is now covering Bangladesh through 25,000 BRAC workers, and is tinkering with its marketing to make the network more efficient. VisionSpring now has 50 such partnerships, including a flourishing one in Rwanda.

Jordan Kassalow, VisionSpring’s CEO, says experienced partners like BRAC may soon be in a position to take over the eyeglass operation without VisionSpring’s help.

“Maybe in three years we’ll have done everything we need to do, and BRAC will be fully independent,” Mr. Kassalow says. “We’ll count that as a victory and move on to the next country.”

Sharing Ideas

Spreading ideas, rather than on-the-ground programs, is another cost-effective way to expand impact. Ariadne Labs, a collaboration between Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard’s School of Public Health, is trying to widely disperse ways to make health care safer. Since the 2007 creation of the organization’s best-known product, a checklist for surgeons that has sharply reduced complications and deaths, Ariadne has considered how to spread the intervention on a limited marketing budget.

The organization gathered 100 influential people, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and others, to create the checklist, and they generated some initial buzz by working through their own networks. Ariadne persuaded nonprofits like Mercy Ships and Smile Train to embrace the checklist and won the endorsement of the World Health Organization and the American College of Surgeons. The best-selling books of Ariadne’s executive director, Atul Gawande, including The Checklist Manifesto, have also helped.

“Every bus that goes by, I want to be on,” says Bill Berry, Ariadne’s chief medical officer.

Health Leads, a national charity based in Boston, works to make sure that people who seek medical care also get connected to other resources they need to remain healthy, including food, transportation, and benefits. The charity started out with a direct-service model that trained college-student volunteers to work with patients at health clinics, but more recently it has expanded to offer tools and expertise to hospitals, medical centers, community health centers, and clinicians so that they can provide the same services. The new model enabled the charity to assist more than 15,000 people last year, five times as many as in 2007.

“The systemic impact is significantly greater than if Health Leads had stuck with the college-student model,” says Kim Syman, a managing partner at New Profit, a venture-philanthropy fund that has granted more than $5 million to Health Leads.

Ms. Syman says New Profit is a “microcosm” of how thinking about expansion has evolved. It was founded in 1998, when the notion of finding stellar charities and replicating them across the country in cookie-cutter fashion was in vogue.

Today, amid growing awareness that no single organization can solve serious social problems, New Profit has moved toward “focus funds” in areas such as early-childhood education, school systems, and career readiness. The funds bring together social entrepreneurs, foundations, donors, policy makers, researchers at charities, and other foundations to explore new approaches to solving problems.

From Local to National

Many of the best new ideas that are started by small but effective charities are growing with almost no physical expansion. BELL, created in 1992 by a group of black and Hispanic students at Harvard Law School, started as an after-school program serving just 20 students. By 2005, it had developed a summer program that showed statistically significant improvements in reading skills for elementary-school students, according to a randomized, controlled trial conducted by the Urban Institute. But in that year — some 13 years after its founding — BELL’s reach remained limited, with just five programs in Boston, New York, and Washington.

The partnership with the Y provided an avenue for BELL to make a national impact on academic achievement without a costly and risky physical expansion, says Lauren Gilbert, BELL’s vice president for program impact. Last summer, only two full-time BELL staff members were needed to mentor the 38 Y associates responsible for implementing the program, known at the Y as Power Scholars Academy. After three years, local Ys can be certified to deliver the program with no more BELL support.

To date, the Y summer programs have matched BELL’s own results — boosting academic progress, as measured by scores on math and reading tests, by an average of two to three months. As the partnership expands exponentially, maintaining that record might prove challenging, Ms. Gilbert concedes. BELL might one day have to become comfortable with Y programs that deliver only 85 to 90 percent of the gains that BELL’s own programs achieve.

But, she says, delivering still-significant gains to a vastly larger group of kids — perhaps one day numbering in the millions — will more than make up for it.n