Your Scale Strategy will outline how you think you will get from where you are now to the Scale Goal you have set. A coherent strategy, aligned with the use of the implementation tools in the Pilot stage, will provide strong foundations for your scaling journey, and will give confidence to your team, organisation, investors and partners.
Your Scale Strategy will need to be more detailed and cover more areas than the strategies you may have developed for testing prototypes and carrying out your pilot. At this point, the level of funding necessary and the complexity of the scaling process mean that you need a far more robust strategy. However, it is still not intended to be a fixed ‘blueprint’; rather, it should be a ‘live’ document updated and iterated, and contains the potential for significant pivots.
The Scaling Aspiration Map will be the starting point for your strategy. The first activity in this module aims to help you analyse the gaps between your Scaling Aspiration Map and the completed version of your Scaling Assessment Map, and to brainstorm the components necessary to fill these gaps. This provides a ‘Scale Bridge’ between your aspirations and goals. Once all of the scaling components have been identified, a ‘Theory of Scale’ helps to put them into a logical format.
Once you have a Scaling Aspiration Map, Scaling Bridge and Theory of Scale, you have the basis for your strategy which brings all this information and analysis into a single document. Finally, it is worth stress testing your strategy before you get started. Our Progress to Scale Framework can be used to evaluate your strategy from a donor perspective.