On Thursday, March 26th, a student-run panel in association with the Trinity Centre for Social Innovation was held in the Dargan Theatre. The panel, entitled “The Hidden Realities of Scaling Social Impact Organisations”, featured local experts in the field of social organisation and grassroots governance.
In particular, students asked questions about the process of scaling a charitable organisation to create more social impact on a broader scale, and the process that goes into maintaining a pristine image throughout the process. Panel participants included Dr Kieran Donohoe, CEO of local youth organisation FDYS and an expert on collaborative governance and youth work policy; Patrick Burke, Director of EMI Capital and former chairman of Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind; Dr Clodagh O’Reilly, the founder of Social Enterprise Solutions and an adjunct professor at Trinity; as well as Dr Dale Whelan, an assistant professor at Trinity and the founder and former CEO of 4 Day Work Week, and organisation advocating for less days on the job in Ireland.
The discussion began with a question for Dr Donohoe on how organisations often lose clarity as they grow and scale, particularly in regards to who has ultimate authority and what is the best way to maximise social impact.
When asked about the maintenance of accountability in large government organisations and how to increase responsiveness without losing standards, Dr Donohue emphasised the use of models, “as they help us understand what’s going on”.
“Models, I think, ha[ve] benefited me hugely. And taking those theories and frameworks and models and applying them to practice is critical … The key for me is around collaborative governance, and I think the fact that I learned early in my career that keeping decision making as close as possible to the stakeholder is what’s key.”
Dr Donohue further cited his experiences growing his organisation through highs and lows, adding that growing can involve setbacks that make even founding members doubt the organisation’s original mission: “there’s a phrase, success has many parents but failure is an orphan. So when things are going really well, everybody wants to be all over your charity. They want to be cut in ribbons and be in photographs with you. And when things are going tough. It’s a very lonely place.”
Mr Burke, after adding to Donohoe’s points with anecdotes of his own experience, discussed further the concept of “mission drift”, or the process of allowing the original idea around a social impact organisation to drift away from its original purpose. “I always like to keep things simple when I can”, he admitted. Alongside Mr Burke was France, a golden retriever and a hard-working employee of Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind.
“When scaling up, its the fundamentals that can be damaged the most”, Mr Burke said. “I would ask people to be clear on their vision and clear on their values. And I think those 2 can often be the casualty of success. So if you’re scaling, try and be true to your vision, and give a very simple approach to your vision. A vision is a future story. So when you start this enterprise, if you are board or if you are a founder starting this enterprise. It had vision, it knew what it wanted to do, but all of a sudden there’s a panic when it becomes realistic and you see a little bit of success and you’re being asked to open an office in Cork or whatever it is. Sometimes that very clear vision that you started with can be lost.”
Dr Brooke, in attendance to discuss the concept of a commercialsed social impact organisation, and how this as a business model can scale, also discussed her “pracademic”, or practical and academic background, with scaling social innovation practice. When asked about the process of making a charity “commercially viable”, Dr Brooke admitted that many organisations with charitable notions were “unrealistic” about the amount of funds that could be raised in order to grow.
“My number one thing I call myself is a ‘scaling-buster’ because lots of social enterprises come to me and say, ‘we have the potential to get impact investment’… and it’s not the right tool. So there’s a real misconception around what tools or what finances might suit them to scale and what their capacity is.”
Dr Brooke then went on to acknowledge the “ambition” of social enterprises, while also noting the inherent difficulties with doing so: “We know that 71% of social enterprises want to scale compared to only 34% of [small to medium sized enterprises]. So the purpose, what they can deliver, is there. The ambition is there, and the answers to otherwise aren’t delivering that. That’s because the tension between scaling your trading model and your social impact model is very difficult.”
Further, upon comparison between a social impact organisation and regular corporations, she concluded that “if you’re a social enterprise, if you’re just selling products and you’re not increasing your social impact, then you are not delivering your mountage.”
Dr Whelan, a member of the School of Psychology at Trinity, primarily focused his portion of the discussion on staffing issues in social impact organisations in the process of scaling operations. His questioning from the panel, perhaps inevitably, revolved around the psychological forces surrounding social movements and organisations trying to increase their presence and their impact on the community at large.
When specifically speaking about his own experience scaling his organisation and the possibility of “chronic exhaustion” during the process, Dr Whelan focused heavily on his company growing “where we [we]re trying to make the biggest difference.” However, with operations annoying in 7 continents, stress soon accumulated with it.
“You can really deliberately focus on applying what you might sell the world to yourself. And you often find, I found anyway, during my 1st time in leadership rule, that I took on a lot of burden of responsibility. The last thing I wanted to do was to overload any of my staff.”
Dr Whelan was quick to point out the irony of dealing with “burnout” given the nature of his organisation’s mission to promote staff welfare worldwide. Pointing out that his initial approach made him “a worse leader”.
“I became more reactive. I became much more isolated. And I didn’t actually seek council from people in my team…So I suppose the reality is that social enterprises are much more prone to burnout because they are trying to change the rules.”
The panel was followed up by a question and answer segment, with audiences dismissed shortly after 3pm.
