This is the third blog post in a series by Alex Cortez on education reformers using “bad language.” Read the first post on “school choice” here and the second post on “accountability” here. 

In K-12 education reform (and the nonprofit ecosystem more broadly), we have a bad habit of using jargon that creates more confusion than clarity. One problematic term — which is often invoked in strategic planning — is “growth.” 

Some organizations will say that they are pursuing “growth.” Others say they are pursuing “scale.” Some organizations are “scaling growth” while others are “growing scale.” It’s a wonder strategic planning ever gets off of first base. 

Any education or nonprofit organization considering growth can benefit from a common language to guide decision-making that segments growth into three categories: growth in scale, growth in success, and growth in sustainability.  

Definition #1: Growth in Scale

Growth in scale means expanding the number of beneficiaries an organization serves, and it typically happens in three major ways: 

• By serving more of the same type of beneficiaries and in the same geography, continuing to grow within an organization’s current parameters. 
• By type of beneficiaries, such as expanding to serve a broader range of students (e.g., a high school expanding “upstream” to serve K-8 students or a postsecondary advising organization broadening the GPA requirement for the students it serves). 
• By geography, such as exploring new locations for a charter school. 

Growth in scale via new beneficiaries and new geographies is not mutually exclusive, though trying to do both at once is often very complicated. 

Definition #2: Growth in Success

Growth in success means increasing the impact an organization is achieving in support of its beneficiaries, and it usually happens in one of two ways: 

• By improving results against an organization’s existing definition of success, be it modifying/improving existing programs or by adding new programs focused on those outcomes. For example, a college access organization that measures its success based on matriculation may add a summer transition program to preempt the “summer melt” between high school graduation and college enrollment. Or, it may make changes to its existing programs (e.g., increasing the number of hours of SAT prep required or expanding the number of target college applications from three to six). 
• By broadening the definition of success. For example, a charter school may expand its definition of a successful graduate from “matriculating to college” to “completing college,” or expand its definition of a successful pathway from a conventional college degree to also include non-degree and workforce pathways.

Definition #3: Growth in Sustainability

Growth in sustainability means pursuing a stronger level of financial performance that sets an organization up for long-term viability, which can happen by: 

• Increasing revenue from existing funding sources or cultivating new funding sources. 
• Changing the cost structure of a program to make it less expensive.  
• Growth in scale leading to economies of scale, where high fixed costs and lower marginal costs enable total true costs (both direct costs and overhead) per beneficiary to come down as scale goes up.

With these definitions of growth in mind, there are a few challenges that leaders must consider. 

First, it’s very hard to pursue and achieve growth in scale, success, and sustainability simultaneously. For example, if an organization is growing in scale into a new geography, it probably wants to focus on scaling its existing program that has a track record of success instead of simultaneously growing in a new place and expanding programming to meet a broader definition of success. An organization growing its definition of success by adding programming is likely to be more expensive — overall and on a cost-per-person served.   

Second, many leaders operate under the assumption that they should always grow. However, growth is a choice, not an obligation. For example, a single-site charter school is not inherently obligated to grow if it’s serving students well under its definition of success. A community-based organization that serves middle schoolers isn’t obligated to expand into a second community or into high school grade levels, or shift its focus from high school completion to postsecondary success. 

That said, there are some good reasons (and maybe not so good reasons) why education and nonprofit organizations may pursue growth. 

• Aspirations or duty to drive impact. Social entrepreneurs begin social innovations to solve social problems, and most social problems in America are pretty large. An organization that is successfully serving 500 K-12 students knows that its program could benefit a significantly greater subset of the 54 million K-12 students nationwide. Most social entrepreneurs are wonderfully irrational in their belief that they can achieve change at scale (without that belief, they likely would never have become social entrepreneurs), and the need is there.  
• The need to support an expanded definition of student success. There is no “silver bullet” solution (another example of bad language for another blog) that will solve structural inequities. A social innovation may be successful in achieving one type of impact for a focused set of beneficiaries (e.g., middle school students), but the needs of those beneficiaries are substantial and extend beyond an organization’s immediate programmatic focus (e.g., middle schoolers’ graduation from high school and progression into careers and life). As a result, that organization’s leaders may feel obligated to expand “upstream” (and serve K-8 students) and/or to intervene “downstream” (and serve high school students) to ultimately help those middle school students succeed. 
• Competition. While we don’t always want to admit it, many education and nonprofit organizations exist in and compete in markets. Where there is significant ambition from similar organizations for growth within a resource-constrained ecosystem (funding, talent, customers), competition is inevitable. In Chaos and Complexity Theory, there is a concept referred to as “The Red Queen Effect” in homage to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” where the Red Queen essentially tells  Alice that, where she comes from, you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. In a competitive market, sometimes an organization must continually grow — be it through scale, success, or sustainability — to retain its relative position to competitors seeking to catch up and pass them, even as it may also be trying to catch up to and outcompete others. 
• Funders. Philanthropy doesn’t tend to fund the same things in perpetuity. Funders can drive growth because they want to fund the “new thing” in scale or success, which pushes organizations to grow in order to continue receiving funding. Funders can also push organizations to change their model around financial sustainability by requiring organizations to diversify the sources of their funding or by sunsetting funding to that organization.  
• Customer Requirements. Customers — including public education systems — often set conditions for winning business that can push organizations to grow to stay competitive. For example, in order to get funding, customers might require a broader geographic reach, serving new age groups, achieving certain success outcomes, or meeting limits on spending per person and overhead costs. Scale may also be a competitive advantage in pursuing yet more customers for growth. 
• Financial drivers that favor growth in scale in order to improve growth in sustainability. Some organizations seek to grow in scale because it enables them to lower costs per beneficiary or outcome. However, organizations can also experience financial diseconomies of scale, such as the need to staff up a central office or make major capital investments (like a software system or building).  
• Critical mass of evidence. Other organizations may expand their scale or definition of success because it helps them build an evidence base and critical mass to be competitive for new sources of funding and/or revenue. 

Once an organization decides which aspects of growth to prioritize, it should consider how to achieve that growth. 

Bellwether’s Pragmatic Playbook for Impact is a practical resource for decision-makers in considering how to pursue all three aspects of growth: 

• Direct Impact: An organization pursues growth of a program that they directly operate. This can be through organic growth, as well as through a range of collaborations (e.g., bringing in partners to run programs side-by-side, building organizational capacity to directly run new programs, or merging with or acquiring other organizations).  
• Widespread Impact: An organization builds the capacity of other organizations to replicate elements of its own model, enabling growth at a scale and speed it may not be able to achieve through Direct Impact alone. However, the design of every Widespread Impact model requires making explicit decisions and trade-offs about breadth versus depth of impact, which then determine the required level of fidelity and control, how much investment is needed, what can be measured, and the corresponding size of the potential market of interested partners.  
• Systemic Impact: An organization shifts mindsets, relationships, and power in order to influence policies, practices, and funding decisions. Successfully influencing systems removes barriers to and creates the conditions needed for population-level impact. Systemic Impact is critical because social problems are shaped by social systems, which determine what programs do and do not get funded, and are the only source of funding at scale. As noted in the playbook, Systemic Impact is “philanthropy’s only exit strategy”; for a nonprofit, it’s “the ultimate in business development.”

A common language around the three aspects of growth can also guide difficult decisions about contraction. Sometimes organizations must pull back from what they’re doing, and this common language around growth (or in this case, anti-growth) can help organizations be specific about if, why, and how to retrench. Maybe an organization’s program is losing funding, requiring the nonprofit to scale back who it serves or narrow the outcomes it pursues in response to pressures on sustainability. Perhaps another organization needs to reduce its cost per beneficiary, which ideally would not impact success, but may require deliberate trade-offs based on what delivers the best return on investment. Perhaps an organization is working in one geography where it is simply not achieving results, even if funding is generous.  

Education and nonprofit organizations are operating in challenging conditions where external pressures make clarity more essential than ever. Making good choices as an organization is predicated on clear communications and collaboration, which in turn requires precision in language. As such, I hope to see the use of these three aspects of growth… continue to grow.