Giving Compass' Take:

• Kevin Starr, writing for Stanford Social Innovation Review, explains why other organizations must adopt your philanthropic model for it to have large-scale impact.

• It's not easy to get others on board with an idea or model. How can you be more receptive toward others' models? How might that help you obtain support from others?

• Read more about the importance of collaboration within nonprofits for large-scale impact.

Say you’ve got a high-impact model that does some wonderful thing—gets primary health care to really poor people, saves coral reefs, or, I dunno, keeps impulsive adolescents from getting tattoos—and you want it to go big. To realize the full potential of your model, you’re going to have to get other “doers” (NGOs, governments, or businesses) to replicate it, and do so well enough to get similar results.

If you want to see another doer organization get the same results you did, you have to stack the deck. Think of your model as software: You developed and ran it on your own hardware (your organization’s structure and operations), and now it needs to run on someone else’s hardware (their structure and operations). So how do you get those other doers to adopt your software—your model—and run it as well as you did?

You need to package your model—your software—so that any capable organization that wants to use it can use it. This is where you begin to stack the deck for successful replication, and, sadly, it’s something we rarely see done systematically or particularly well.

Mostly, I see organizations waiting to see who comes knocking. I think that’s a mistake. I think you need to get out there and sell. But you first need to think about who you are selling to.

Organizations often underestimate the amount of support that will be required. But the better you design the package, and the better you choose your customers, the less effort and resources you’ll eventually have to spend on support.

Read the full article about achieving large-scale impact by Kevin Starr at Stanford Social Innovation Review.