Study of 100 fast-growing organizations finds striking consistency
within four critical areas
by Kelly Campbell and Rohit MenezesOften, it can take heroic efforts to simply maintain a nonprofit organization’s services. So, when organizations grow, they likely are doing something special; and those that grow the fastest may be doing something extraordinary.
To learn more about that “secret sauce,” the fastest-growing youth-serving nonprofits in the United States were put under a microscope by The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization that helps leaders of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations make strategic decisions to build capacity and accelerate social change. It identified 100 such organizations and asked 26 of their leaders to identify the factors critical to their organizations’ ability to grow.
The findings indicated that growth rarely was an unexpected windfall for these organizations. Rather, it most often resulted from a leadership-level commitment to four pillars of growth:
- preparing systematically for growth;
- demonstrating clear programmatic results;
- marketing purposefully to specific funders; and
- actively engaging board members’ time, talents, and financial resources.
Pillar 1: Preparing Systematically for Growth
Rather than scrambling to build the necessary capacity to carry out newly seized opportunities, growth today is more often the result of strategic choice. Successful organizations are those that are prepared for growth and depend less on happenstance.
LIST OF 100 FASTEST-GROWING | |
For some, preparation means developing and executing a formal growth plan. Others intentionally develop specific capabilities. This may involve implementing data systems, strengthening advocacy and communications infrastructure, refocusing fundraising efforts, evaluating programs, hiring and organizing staff, or any other effort that prepares organizations to identify and respond to the right opportunities when they arise.
SCO Family of Services, Glen Cove, N.Y., which provides shelter and other youth and family services on Long Island and in New York City, is one example of the latter approach. The organization realized that a potential barrier to fast growth was the complexity of its back-office functions, which include real estate development, site management, staffing, and technology.
In response, SCO created a mobile “SWAT team” of business, human resources, and information technology staff to handle property leases, building renovations, phones, and other operational concerns. This allows the agency to quickly start up new service sites as needs and opportunities arise—a characteristic especially valued by their government funders.
Pillar 2: Demonstrating Programmatic Results
Nearly one-third of the organizations studied use an evidence-based practice that has been proven to deliver positive outcomes in a randomized control trial; many others employ promising interventions tested with less rigorous forms of evaluation. These organizations are deeply engaged in tracking their results, with more than half employing full-time performance assessment staff.
The leaders interviewed in Bridgespan’s study emphasized the importance of tailoring their reporting to the metrics championed by particular funders. They indicated that all funders are interested in process measures, but fewer are interested in outcome measures.
State governments, in particular, tend to be highly focused on measures of process, such as number of clients enrolled, units of service provided, and so on. However, a few leaders reported that a small set of state government decision makers increasingly are paying attention to outcomes, a shift that likely helped propel their rapid growth.
Pillar 3: Marketing Purposefully
Success in fundraising, according to many of the nonprofit leaders interviewed, depends on shaping how funders perceive their organizations.
Whether marketing takes the form of building relationships to win over particular government influencers, or offering private funders a clear and coordinated message, these organizations concentrate their efforts on their most important sources of current or potential revenue.
To influence government funders, the fastest-growing organizations often hire government relations staff, focus on becoming a knowledge resource to policymakers, and invest in advocacy efforts.
One example is Alliance for Children and Families member Youth Villages, Memphis, Tenn., a multistate organization that serves emotionally and behaviorally troubled youth and their families. The organization has a business development team that travels the country, building relationships state-by-state. Although such work can take dozens of meetings and several years before yielding results, these efforts have allowed Youth Villages to expand to 10 states and Washington, D.C.
Pillar 4: Actively Engaging Board Members
The majority of the leaders interviewed attribute their organization’s growth, at least in part, to their board.
The notion that boards play an important role in growth may sound obvious, but the organizations studied seem to do a particularly good job of leveraging board members’ passion for the cause and encouraging board members to dedicate time, talent, and money.
Board members of the fastest growing organizations made serious commitments to offer their expertise. They also fueled growth through their personal wealth and by calling upon the wealth of their peers and colleagues.
At Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas, for example, active board-level engagement was critical to the highly successful “merger of equals” of the Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington affiliates. The boards of the separate organizations included visionary business leaders who could articulate the need for the merger and sell it to others. They formed a new governing board with equal representation from the three existing boards, so all parties felt it was a true partnership.
Consistency Across Organizations
No study is complete without caveats. Here is a big one: Bridgespan’s study focused only on nonprofits that displayed rapid growth in revenue.
There are two reasons for utilizing this definition of growth. First, these fastest-growing organizations are a headline story; they provide an ever-growing share of the nation’s youth services. Second, revenue growth is one of the few nonprofit metrics that is systematically available for study.
The study makes no claim that the agencies that can grow their revenues fastest are automatically the ones that are having the greatest impact on youth, families, and communities. However, the consistency of the findings across the study’s 26 in-depth interviews is striking. Over and over leaders of fast-growing youth organizations identified the same set of growth generators: they planned and built capacity for growth, took pains to deliver results, explicitly tailored their messages for funders, and relied heavily on their boards for the resources and energy needed to grow.
T
his article is a condensation of a white paper that details the study’s findings, provides numerous examples, and includes additional information about methodology. Kelly Campbell is a partner in The Bridgespan Group’s Boston office and leads the organization’s youth development practice. Rohit Menezes is a manager in Bridgespan’s New York office.
Printer-friendly version
