As social enterprises scale, maintaining a strong focus on their mission and impact becomes a key challenge. Growth often brings increased complexity, requiring careful planning to avoid mission drift while expanding reach and resources. Here are strategies to ensure social enterprises can scale effectively without losing sight of their core mission.
- Use strong, mission-driven leadership.
Decision makers must consistently emphasise the social mission and the routes to achieving it. For some, new products/services or growth can further impact towards their objectives, whereas others may use partnerships to reduce the risk of developing the organisation. In each case these decisions need to be carefully assessed against the mission of the enterprise. Mechanisms to achieve this are clear communication of values, performance metrics that reflect commercial and mission-based goals, and transparent decision making. Companies like Patagonia have demonstrated that embedding mission into corporate culture fosters resilience during growth phases.
- Measure & track impact.
To maintain mission alignment, it’s essential to develop a robust system for measuring and tracking impact. This includes setting key social impact metrics alongside financial performance indicators. These tools need to reflect the enterprise meaning leaders can utilise existing measures, such as the B Impact Assessment, or develop new ones. In each case measuring success in terms of both profit and purpose is crucial. This serves multiple purposes. Firstly, it communicates impact to external stakeholders who might also provide additional resources to assist the enterprise. Secondly, it provides social enterprises with mechanisms to assess and adjust their strategies while scaling.
- Active stakeholder engagement
Managing stakeholders is crucial when scaling a social enterprise. Collaborating with beneficiaries, partners, employees, and investors helps ensure that growth strategies align with the needs of the communities served. It also helps foster trust and ensures that social value creation remains central. Strategies to achieve this are spaces of negotiation (bringing all stakeholders to inform future strategy) and herding spaces (connecting with external decision makers to widen knowledge of opportunities or threats in the ecosystem). An example would be the Grameen Bank, who have successfully scaled by continuously involving community stakeholders in their growth journey.
Choosing the right growth model is key to scaling without mission drift. For example, franchising can allow social enterprises to expand while ensuring that each branch adheres to the same mission and values. Similarly, hybrid models that blend profit and purpose can create sustainable growth while preserving impact.
References
Dees, J.G. (2017) The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship. Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=261683
Ebrahim, A., Battilana, J. and Mair, J. (2014) ‘The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations’, Research in Organisational Behaviour, 34, pp. 81–100. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2014.09.001
Smith, W.K., Gonin, M. and Besharov, M.L. (2013) ‘Managing social-business tensions: A review and research agenda for social enterprise’, Business Ethics Quarterly, 23(3), pp. 407–442