You will probably find that there are multiple phases to your scaling journey between ending your pilot and reaching your endgame. If your endgame is where you eventually want to end up, your Scale Goal is the goal you are hoping to achieve in your next 2-5 year phase of scaling. (Each phase is a similar time period to an organisational strategy, and this approach should be used at the start of each phase).

Nesta’s Making it Big report provides some useful guiding questions for setting a scale goal (see p15). Your Scale Goal builds on the Impact Goal that you developed as part of your Challenge Brief, and your Pilot Goal in the Pilot stage, and is designed to give you a short-medium term goal that you can build your scale strategy on. In your pilot you should have evidenced how your solution has achieved impact – your Scale Goal is about how you scale this impact.

Your scale goal should consider the following aspects:

• Timeframe: What is the time period for this phase?
• Target group (description and number): Who are you targeting, and how many are in this group?
• Geographies: Where are you hoping to scale?
• Method: What is the method or pathway you will be testing (e.g. partnering, direct implementation, open-source)?

For example:

By 2023 we will have provided access to potable water for 10,000 people affected by crises in five emergency responses across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through up to eight organisations adopting and implementing our innovation.

By 2023, we will have supported 50,000 adolescent refugee girls in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria to access open-source, curriculum aligned, quality e-learning education in numeracy and literature.

Your Scale Goal should not be simply plucked out of thin air; it should be achievable and based on what you are trying to learn and achieve in the coming scale phase. The Scale Goals above are specific enough to provide targets that are measurable, but still wide enough for the details of the how to be developed.

In the first example, the goal aims to test a couple of things above the ‘reach’ of the solution: whether the innovation can be implemented in different countries and different continents, and whether other organisations will adopt and implement the solution. In the second example, the goal also aims to test whether they can align their e-learning numeracy and literacy product with the curriculum in four countries.