Caritas Europa, Caritas Vienna and WWF Innovation team have been learning from each other for several years through the Innovation for Impact Network (IFIN), a community of practice for innovation leaders and impact-driven organizations. Its goal is to build a culture of innovation across the non-profit sector, breaking down silos and fostering the kind of interdisciplinary learning and experimentation that creates lasting impact. Both organizations bring strong innovation teams to that table, and both share a conviction that innovation is key to delivering higher impact; WWF through years of building up innovation culture within the whole WWF Network, Caritas Europa through decades of frontline social impact work and a network of practitioners hungry for the same practical thinking.

It was through those conversations that we, Caritas Europa, Caritas Vienna and WWF, identified an opportunity. Environmental and social impact INGOs, for all their differences, run into the same walls when it comes to innovating. They struggle with not having enough time, funding structures that are too rigid to leave room for experimentation and not enough capacity building opportunities on how to innovate rather than just why it matters. This shared recognition became the seed of InnovAction — a bet that a conservation organization and a social impact network could build something together that neither could build as well alone: a free, self-paced, six-week digital learning course for NGO practitioners.

From idea to application

In November 2024, we decided to submit a joint application for the European Union Erasmus+ funding to bring InnovAction to life. Over the following months, teams from both organizations worked together to shape the course, anchored around three questions:

That groundwork became the proposal. It went into the Erasmus+ Small-Scale Partnerships program in March 2025, and funding was confirmed to bring this idea into life. From there, both teams got to work turning shared experience, case studies and lessons learned into a single six-week learning journey, brought together on one platform.

Putting it to the test

Before opening InnovAction more widely, we wanted to know whether it actually worked, so we tested it in two ways.

First, hands-on testing with NGO practitioners. Reaching out through newsletters and internal channels across both networks, we invited practitioners to be among the first to go through the course and provide their feedback and insights. Sixty-three of them, from Caritas Europa, Caritas Vienna and WWF, said yes. Testers got access to the platform and worked through the full six-week course at their own pace. Caritas also decided to run live workshops alongside it to offer a space to reflect together and surface feedback while testers were going through it, rather than waiting until the end. Once testers finished, we asked them to share with us what had worked and what hadn’t through a final survey.

Second, expert validation with members from the Innovation for Impact Network, leaders of innovation and members of innovation teams at some of the largest social and conservation INGOs. Eight people from six different organizations reviewed the course structure and content during a live workshop, looking at whether it covered all the right ground, in the right order to build a solid foundation of innovation knowledge. They shared what might be missing and what needed to change to reach our objective.

Once the testing period was completed we processed all feedback with the final objective of incorporating everything we heard into a final iteration of the course, one that feels relevant and valuable for everyone and that is built to scale across different organizations and contexts.

What we heard

The feedback told a consistent story: the course was genuinely landing and relevant and people were generous in sharing their thoughts on how to make it even better.

What stood out most was that testers reported the content changing both their knowledge and also how they think. Testers described walking away with a real innovation mindset; a new instinct to look at a challenge from multiple angles before jumping to solutions. Tools like the Six Hats method and the Empty Chair technique came up again and again as things people had already started using with their own teams, and the case studies shared throughout the course stood out as the most valuable content in the course. Several said they were already running “worst idea” exercises, building in retrospectives, and seeking out fresh perspectives from colleagues outside a project, exactly the shift the course set out to create.

People also spoke warmly about how it was built. They liked the self-paced modules and practical exercises, and the workbook and innovation glossary were called out as tools they’d keep coming back to.

Alongside the praises, came clear, constructive suggestions. Testers wanted to see more examples from the social sector sitting alongside conservation case studies already in the course. There was a clear interest in seeing more case studies throughout the course, examples of how to bring innovation knowledge and methods from theory to practice through real-life stories.

What comes next

This feedback is now shaping the next iteration that incorporates feedback received. The ambition hasn’t changed. We continue our path to creating a free, open-access course that anyone can pick up and run with, regardless of whether their work is rooted in forests or in food banks.

InnovAction started as a bet that two very different organizations, speaking two different professional languages, could build something more useful together than apart. Sixty-three testers in, that bet is looking like a good one and we’re just getting started.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor OeAD-GmbH can be held responsible for them.

Not every WWF office has a strategy team. But every office needs a strategy. That gap is where the Innovation Team steps in. Whether supporting an office with a €2 million budget or a €72 million one, we bring the same toolkit: process design, innovation methods, and skilled facilitation. This is our five-step approach to making those strategies happen, and what we’ve learned from doing it.

Why an Innovation Team can lead strategy processes

How do you make strategy feel less like something done to people, and more like something built with them? As the innovation team at WWF, we challenged ourselves to develop strategies differently. The result? Staff co-owning the strategy, cross department trust strengthened, leadership reimagined, a strategy that is actually useful on a day-to day basis, measurement systems that matter.

Three examples to show the diversity in strategy processes we have run:

1. WWF Romania’s conservation division of 65 staff needed a new 5-year strategy in alignment with the global WWF strategy,
2. WWF Netherlands had a leadership change matched with their old strategy’s timeline running out leading to a full office (145 staff) strategy process of 18 months
3. WWF Hong Kong, with their 110 staff, was looking for a 9-month process towards their next 3 year strategy and facilitated mostly in Cantonese: a great chance for a train-the-trainer approach

Our role is to design the process together with the leadership team, create tools and templates, provide hands-on (virtual and in-person) facilitation, bring best practices from across WWF and beyond, host sharing sessions across the network to disseminate learnings. All these actions are always anchored in the belief that strategy should be a growth experience for the entire office.

Taking an Innovative Approach to Strategy Development

Picture this. A WWF office gathers in person not to finalize a 100-page strategy document, but to co-create a strategy that shifts and grows with them. Instead of a static document, they build something alive that is exciting, challenging, inspiring and dare we say, fun.

That’s the spirit of the process we encourage teams to take. With innovation embedded in the journey, offices embrace co-ownership, dreaming, and alignment. The design is intentionally simple and memorable on the surface, but rigorous beneath. It prioritizes staff experience, trust and skill-building, with workshops that spark bigger questions and creativity to reimagine what is possible.

By the end, offices walk away with a multi-year strategy including very tangible sub-strategies for key areas, and a one-year roadmap for the first year of implementation. Side effects that we design for: a strengthened culture of collaboration, trust to face challenges ahead jointly and pride to be part of realizing this strategy. The Strategy process becomes both the outcome and the transformation itself.

The Five Phases of the Innovative Strategy Journey

When working with teams either on their first- ever strategy or updating an existing one, we encourage them to follow a structured but flexible framework of five phases:

Step 1. Process Prep Build the container before the conversation

Before any strategy content is discussed, we work with the leadership team to design the process itself. In a series of virtual sessions, we define the objectives, scope and timeline together, map key stakeholders and clarify their roles. The goal is a shared roadmap that gives everyone confidence in the journey ahead before it begins.

Innovation Team edge: We go beyond logistics. We invite leadership to define the spirit of the process: what it should feel like, not just what it should produce. We ask them to articulate what success looks like for staff, for themselves, and for the office as a whole. And we open an honest conversation about power: who holds it, how decisions will be made, and how to ensure the process works with people rather than around them.

Step 2. Analyse: Listen before you lead

This phase is about building a full and honest picture of where the office stands. Through surveys, interviews and workshops, we gather insights from across the organization, looking at what worked in the last strategy period, what didn’t, and what the external landscape demands going forward. Good analysis doesn’t just inform the strategy; it creates early buy-in by making people feel heard.

Innovation Team edge: We designed a structured team reflection template that guides groups through their own honest reckoning: celebrating successes, naming failures, extracting learnings. Crucially, it also asks teams to assess what should be stopped, grown or scaled in the next period. This is often the beginning of staff feeling like they have ownership of the strategy process. AI can be a helpful support in this step to help synthesise the reflections and feedback for the Framing step.

Step 3. Frame: From insights to direction

With the analysis complete, we bring leadership and key voices from the office together to make sense of what emerged. This is where raw insight becomes strategic direction: defining vision, mission, strategic priorities and organizational goals. An important moment to pause and assess where change might be needed and host honest conversations on what the world needs going forward. Equally important is surfacing the tensions and decisions that need to be resolved before the wider team can meaningfully contribute.

Innovation Team edge: We consolidate all of this into a strategy house, a visual framework where the roof holds purpose, vision and mission, and the pillars represent goals and key strategic areas of work. This gives staff a clear skeleton to build on in the next phase, rather than a blank page. In addition, a decision grid creates visibility for all the questions that need answering and possible avenues to choose ahead.

Step 4. Design: Get concrete, get collaborative

This is where strategy becomes action. The framing phase indicates what themes will be worked on by design teams — this can be existing teams but might also mean new groups are framed to explore new areas of work. These Design Teams then develop detailed plans for their workstreams, defining activities, Key Progress Indicators and responsibilities. We work at two levels: high-level for the full strategy period, and detailed for year one. We also encourage teams to consciously separate routine work from innovation, making space for both operational excellence and forward-looking ambition.

Innovation Team edge: We build in deliberate cross-team exchange: structured moments where departments share their plans with each other. This is about more than just avoiding conflicting priorities. It’s where the most valuable synergies emerge, and where a collection of team plans starts to feel like one coherent strategy. AI can be helpful in this step to provide an extra set of eyes to identify overlaps, gaps and missed synergies.

Step 5. Final Strategy: Make it real, make it stick

The final phase is about rigor and readiness. We work with leadership to validate the strategy against its original objectives, integrate feedback, align budgets and prepare for board sign-off. The goal is a strategy that is not only ambitious but actionable, ready for the first day of implementation, not just the last day of the process.

Innovation Team edge: We encourage offices to involve their board and key partners throughout the process, not just at the end. Whether through updates, co-creation sessions or structured feedback moments, this transforms sign-off from a hurdle into a formality. By the time the strategy reaches the board, it has already been shaped by the people needed to bring it to life.

Methods we use within the innovative strategy process

Our process is grounded in proven innovation frameworks including Double Diamond, Design Thinking, Three Horizons and Systems Thinking. Together they ensure the process balances imagination with rigor. Central to our approach is the Double Diamond, a design model that moves between divergent and convergent thinking to turn complexity into clarity.

When using the double diamond approach in each phase of the strategy process, teams move through four key areas:

• Discover: Exploring problems, gathering insights, and broadening perspectives. The goal is to look at the problem from multiple perspectives and gather as much information as possible.
• Define: Synthesizing insights into a clear focus. The aim is to define the core problem or challenge that needs to be addressed and help narrow down the focus to set clear objectives.
• Develop: Generating and testing ideas. The goal is to explore various possibilities and iterate on the ideas to refine them.
• Deliver: Implementing solutions and refining them in practice. The goal is to deliver a solution that effectively addresses the defined problem.

The Double Diamond in practice

This model encourages teams to learn from the past, look ahead, and innovate their way into the future. For example, in our strategy work with WWF Romania, we applied the Double Diamond approach to structure all phases, including the analysis phase. During the Discover stage, the team split into analysis groups to explore key questions to analysis the office’s current/past strategy including niche, innovation and impact. In the Define stage, the teams synthesized these insights into themes and core challenges that framed the strategic context. Moving into Develop, they generated ideas on how WWF Romania could respond, surfacing options and possible decisions for the new strategy. Finally, we converged in a larger team meeting to refine these ideas, prioritize solutions and test how they could be put into practice. This led us nicely into the Framing phase.

Designing for inclusion

A central ingredient throughout our involvement is inclusive engagement. Staff are not passive recipients of the strategy but co-creators through surveys, interviews, workshops and working groups. Together, we co-design processes with leadership and staff, coach taskforces to lead the journey and facilitate workshops together. Sometimes in practice this looks like consensus voting on a decision using the fist of five method where everyone gets space to share their views and thoughts.

Our role is not to dictate content but to empower offices to support teams to reach to unfold their full potential and set-up inspiring ways of working. This results in innovative strategies that are not only robust but also enjoyable to create, ambitious in scope and deeply rooted in each office’s unique context.

A new era for strategy is here

Our work with WWF Romania, WWF Netherlands or WWF Hong Kong shows that strategy today is about transformation. With WWF’s Innovation Team as a partner, offices are designing better strategies and cultivating stronger cultures, deeper collaboration and greater conservation impact. Strategy has stopped being something we write once and shelve. It’s now something we live, co-create and grow together. Rethinking strategy this way is not a nice-to-have, it is essential given our complex challenges, state of the world and the AI disruption ahead.

“The reframing workshops and strategy support were particularly valuable because they were thoughtfully designed and tailored to our team’s specific needs.The sessions struck the right balance between open dialogue and driving towards clear outcomes, ensuring that important decisions were made efficiently and collaboratively. This approach not only built alignment across the team but also created a sense of ownership and commitment to the strategy moving forward.” — Barbara Bendandi (WWF Romania Conservation Director)

Strategy is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice, and one that gets sharper with every conversation. If our experience sparks new thinking for your team, we’d love to hear where it takes you. What approaches have shaped your strategy work?

By Kate Gardner
Kate Gardner is an innovation consultant who has spent the past five years supporting WWF’s global innovation team. Before that, she designed and managed funds in the creative and social economies and built up a food security social enterprise in South Africa. She has experienced grant funds from both sides — as a grantee and as the manager of a number of $ multi-million global funds. This article draws on what she has learned from each.

I’ve experienced grant funds from both sides of the table — first as a grantee, then as the person designing and managing them.

Earlier in my career, I was part of one of the first widely-known food security social enterprises in South Africa. We received two grants: a social innovation award and an INGO Grand Challenge. Later, as part of WWF’s Innovation team, I spent several years managing the WWF Global Practice Innovation Fund — a €1 million-per-year fund supporting 28 innovation projects across more than 20 countries.

Those experiences, and the contrast between them, shaped everything I now think about fund design. A fund’s structure is never neutral. Every decision — about application length, contract terms, disbursement timing, feedback — sends a message to the people you’re trying to support. The question is whether that message reflects the values you say you hold.

This piece is an attempt to share what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what I’d do differently.

1. Start with purpose: Let it drive everything

Grant funds go by many names: innovation funds, impact awards, catalytic funds, grand challenges. But they all refer to the same basic idea: a way to distribute funding to teams, projects, or organisations working toward a shared goal. What varies enormously is how well their design reflects why they exist.

Until you have real clarity on the fund’s purpose, you can’t meaningfully design its structure. The answers to “why this fund exists” will shape everything, from grant size to application processes, contract terms to reporting structures and what types of non-financial support to offer alongside the money.

Take the WWF Practice Innovation Fund as an example. Its ultimate purpose was to drive conservation impact by fostering innovation. This aligned with the mandate of our team:- to advance innovation capability and culture across the WWF network. That meant the fund needed to do more than finance innovative conservation projects. It had to build innovation capabilities through learning by doing, generate case studies to demonstrate the impact of innovation, and reinforce innovation as a strategic priority across the organisation.

This purpose showed up the design at every level.

We embedded innovation training into the application process itself: not as a hoop to jump through, but as a genuine opportunity to strengthen both the applicants and their ideas. We offered flexible training options across timezones and experience levels, including group design thinking sprints and Theory of Change workshops. We brought in knowledge managers to help teams with market research. The application process became part of the programme, not just a gateway to it.

We required applicants to include staff time or consultant support in their budgets, explicitly challenging the common donor restriction on overheads while also ensuring that offices with less unrestricted funding would be able to pay for the staff time required for them to participate. If you want implementation to succeed, you have to fund the people doing the work. And in this case, their learning and growth was part of the point. Consultant time was allowed but capped, to ensure the people gaining experience through implementation would remain in the organisation rather than move on.

Contract structure mattered too. Too often, innovation grants use delivery-of-service — style contracts that rigidly lock in deliverables set at proposal stage, expecting teams to deliver on predictions made before any real testing has happened. That trades maximum impact for maximum compliance. Instead, we built flexibility in from the start. Small changes could be made freely; for more substantial pivots, we created a clear, evidence-based mechanism for adjustment. Grantees could refine their KPIs and outputs based on what they actually learned.

Not every fund has the same aim. Some foster cross-country partnerships. Some want to spark unusual collaborations. Others aim to test early-stage ventures for scale.

Purpose should be more than a tagline. It should be the blueprint.

2. Let your values show in the process

If purpose sets the direction, values shape the journey. A fund’s design communicates something to everyone it touches, applicants, awardees, partners, whether you intend it to or not. Better to be intentional about what it says.

On power and fairness

One norm I’ve worked hard to challenge is asking applicants to invest significant time, thought, and unpaid labour into long, complex applications, with no guarantee of selection and often no feedback. This is especially problematic in innovation funding, where applicants are asked to share original ideas, essentially offering intellectual property, before any relationship of trust exists. For small or under-resourced teams, the barrier is even higher.

In one creative-economy fund I managed, we responded to this by designing a multi-stage process. It began with a short expression of interest, basic eligibility details and a brief summary of the idea. Only those who progressed were asked for more. And crucially, we offered meaningful compensation to those invited to submit full proposals: not a token honorarium, but a proper payment that recognised the intellectual and emotional labour involved.

One of the most compelling partnerships to come out of that fund was between organisations supporting domestic workers in Hillbrow, South Africa and Hackney, United Kingdom: exploring what synergies could exist between cleaner collectives in both cities, facilitating workshops with 24 domestic workers, and creating pathways toward collaborative social enterprises. Knowledge and innovation flowed from the Global South to the UK, not the other way around. That only happened because the fund was designed to make space for it.

On trust and transparency

Trust has to show up in the design, not just the values statement.

In the WWF Practice Innovation Fund, we made the selection process as transparent as we could. We shared anonymised profiles of the selection panel, published the full scoring rubric alongside the application questions, and instructed reviewers to write feedback in a tone suitable for sharing. Every applicant received anonymised comments from each reviewer, along with their score. This demystified the process and gave people something useful, whether they were selected or not.

We also built trust into how we structured financial disbursements. Where appropriate, we released the full grant amount upfront, with clear clauses for fund return only if the project veered significantly off-course. Releasing funds in tightly controlled tranches or requiring detailed tracking of every penny, creates administrative burden and communicates something uncomfortable: that you don’t quite trust the very people you’ve chosen to support. Unless a team has shown they can’t manage funds, they usually know best how to use them.

On inclusion:

One fund I worked on targeted the creative economy. In recognition that some applicants communicate better in non-written formats, we allowed people to submit a short video or voice recording instead of a written proposal. A small decision, but one that aligned with the spirit of the fund and opened the door to people who might otherwise have self-selected out.

Inclusion also means accounting for language and access. Where possible, we translated application materials and offered interpreted webinars or used live Q&A sessions with multilingual support. These aren’t grand gestures. , But they signal to people who often experience institutional exclusion that we value them, and their ideas.

On mutual respect

Every part of the funding process should deliver value to the people participating, whether they’re selected or not.

That starts with the basics: confirming receipt of applications, sticking to stated timelines, and communicating decisions. I’ve applied to enough funds myself to know how dispiriting it is when the submission you worked hard on disappears into a void, with no confirmation, timeline, or closure.

But it should go further. In several funds I’ve managed, we’ve built open-access training, networking opportunities, and staged feedback into the process so that even unsuccessful applicants walk away with something useful.

And the further someone progresses, the more you owe them. In the final stages of the WWF Practice Innovation Fund, we offered 30-minute feedback calls to all unsuccessful finalists, joint calls with myself and a selection panellist. On these calls, we walked through their proposal, explained the decision, and offered coaching to help strengthen their thinking for wherever they applied next.

3. Thinking in portfolios, not just projects

One of a fund’s greatest strengths lies in the collective value of the projects it supports. When you think of awarded projects not as a loose collection but as a deliberately curated portfolio, you start to see mutual reinforcement: teams sharing learnings, navigating similar challenges together, and even co-creating solutions that serve the wider ecosystem.

The diversity within a single cohort can be striking. The WWF Practice Innovation Fund supported a team in Hong Kong developing an AI-powered cargo screening tool to detect mis-declared wildlife products in shipping documentation — a technology-driven enforcement solution built with CITES expertise and adaptive algorithms to flag suspicious shipments. In the same fund, a team in Tanzania was mobilising interfaith coalitions (Catholic, Anglican, and Muslim communities) to lead reforestation in the Ruvuma Transboundary Landscape, planting over 110,000 trees across 213 hectares. These are fundamentally different approaches to conservation. But sitting within the same portfolio, they surface shared questions about partnerships, adoption, and sustainability; and the teams benefit from seeing how others navigate those challenges from entirely different starting points.

To make that happen, you need to be intentional about post-award support. We ran regular group check-ins and peer-learning sessions for the full cohort , and identified smaller clusters of two or three projects working on similar themes, creating dedicated spaces for them to connect. We also provided thematic support across the group: PMEL training, storytelling, and pitch coaching designed to set teams up for success beyond the life of the grant.

When it works well, the portfolio itself becomes a learning community: one that benefits the grantees, the funder, and the field.

There’s one thing I’d do differently

There is one thing I’d change if I could go back.

During close-out conversations for the last WWF fund, I asked project teams, many of whom had successfully established proof of concept, what came next. Most were unsure. They looked to us for direction. And I realised we hadn’t set them up for what comes after.

We had treated innovation and scaling as entirely separate stages, as if scalability was someone else’s problem to solve later. But that isn’t how it works. We missed a real opportunity to help these projects build scalability into their models from the start, and to support them in testing both the scalability and the long-term impact of their ideas. How we’re beginning to address that is something I’ll explore in a forthcoming piece.

In the meantime, have you managed or received a grant fund like this? What worked? What would you do differently?

Surveys often get a bad reputation. Too long, too dull, too often ignored.

While collaborating with the WWF’s innovation team, we developed a robust M&E approach to better understand the impact of innovation in conservation work and to better understand the culture of innovation within the organisation.

The survey serves as our way of getting solid data from a geographic dispersed network in order to report on outcome progress and also discover what works and what doesn’t. Over the past three years, our annual innovation survey has not only survived but thrived; growing year on year and amassing over 3,300 responses (+1200 for 2024 alone, our highest participation so far with over 13% of staff completing the survey).

In a network as diverse and busy as WWF, that’s no small feat.

A survey is only as good as the engagement it generates

So, what made it work? And how can others replicate this success? Here’s the top 10 things we learned over the last three years.

1. Branding matters — give it an identity

We treated our survey like a campaign, not just a questionnaire. We gave it an intriguing title and a new illustration to catch attention and a clear purpose. When something looks and feels special while staying within your overall branding, people are more likely to engage and connect it to your team.

2. Consistency is key

Our survey wasn’t a one-off event. By running it annually with consistent branding and purpose, it became a trusted and anticipated moment in the WWF calendar. Each year we have a clear purpose as to why the survey is important and share how we will use the data. The more consistent data we can get each year, the better likelihood of learning how things have changed.

3. Answering “what’s in it for me?”

No one enjoys answering a survey just for the sake of it. So, we made it worth their while:

Prizes for individuals — each year we gifted a random survey respondent a fun and useful prize. These have ranged from innovative meeting energizer card deck to a 6 week AI training offered through our partners at TechSoup.

Team-based incentives — A great way to foster collaboration is to get the entire office involved. Each year we offered a prize for the WWF office with the highest number of responses and highest % of offices represented. These prizes have ranged from an office specific innovation customized training to a custom innovation illustrated art piece.

Prizes that benefit everyone — This year we introduced for the first time, an instant gift to anyone who completed the survey. This ensured that everyone benefited from the survey immediately upon submission by receiving an ice-breaker playlist to energize their meetings.

4. Healthy competition boosts participation

We introduced a little friendly rivalry. Offices and teams competed for the highest participation rates, and when competition kicks in, so does engagement. We make sure to provide updates on who the top 5 offices are throughout the survey open period to keep the network updated and motivated!

5. Make the survey educational & engaging

We designed the survey so that taking it wasn’t just about giving feedback, it was also an opportunity to learn something new. Each section reinforced key concepts related to innovation, making the time spent on the survey worthwhile in itself.

We found that each year about 50% of the survey respondents are new WWF employees who are not familiar with innovation. Every year we get a few hundred new newsletter sign ups through the survey. This attracts new people to our innovation work, demonstrating that the survey acts as both an education and key engagement tool to introduce them to the topic and point them where they can go to learn more.

6. The right mix of questions

People appreciate brevity. We kept the number of open-ended questions low but made sure the ones we included were powerful and insightful. In total the survey averaged around 25 relevant questions per respondent. Below is a sample of the types of questions included in the survey:

In 2024, how many times have you/your project team used innovative approaches, methods or tools in a conservation project?

Do you feel you have the necessary skills to apply innovation in your role?

On a scale of 0–10, How would you rate your current awareness of innovation and innovative ways of working / tools?

How could the Innovation@WWF team have a more substantial impact on WWF?

7. Customisation creates connection

Where possible, we tailored questions to different WWF teams, seniority and regions, making the survey feel relevant rather than one-size-fits-all. We use TypeForm to create our survey and take advantage of their logic and branching options to ensure that respondents only see questions that make sense for them.

8. Less is more when it comes to reminders

A well-timed, well-phrased reminder can make all the difference. We made sure to reach out to all groups, reinforcing that every voice matters. We use various channels to do this, including direct emailing to all office leaders with an update on their office’s response rate.

We’ve learned that when it comes to reminders, less is more. Instead of bombarding people with constant messages, we focus on a few key moments over a five week period: a launch announcement to get it on their radar, a nudge halfway through and a final push in the last week.

9. Share the learning: Insights must be used

A survey without action is a wasted effort. We ensured that results were shared and used at multiple levels:

• Office and region-specific insights were provided in custom made powerpoints that helped tailor strategies and our customised support to them. Yes, this means we created roughly 100 individually tailored powerpoints!
• Bite-sized takeaways made it easy for busy teams to engage. We share these network-wide in our newsletter, internal communication channels and in meetings. It provides us with months of engaging content.
• Public reporting builds transparency and accountability. We use the insights from the survey (along with our ongoing quarterly reflection and measurement periods) to create our annual Innovation@WWF impact report. This allows us to showcase the impact of our work and learnings for the year ahead.

10. Evolve and improve: learn from each year

A good survey doesn’t just collect data; it refines itself over time. Each year, we took a step back to reflect on what worked and what didn’t by documenting insights, engagement trends, and feedback from participants.

This helped us:

• Fine-tune the questions to be more relevant and engaging.
• Improve the user experience by making the survey easier and faster to complete.
• Adapt incentives and communication strategies to better resonate with our audience.

By treating the survey as a living tool, rather than a static template, we ensured it remained fresh, relevant, and continuously impactful, leading to even better engagement year after year.

So, is the survey dead?

Absolutely not. It’s just evolving and requires innovation to keep it relevant. When designed with purpose, engagement, and impact in mind, a survey remains one of the most effective tools to gather insights, drive change, and track progress.

If you’re planning to launch a survey in your own organisation, start by asking: How can I make it matter to my audience? If you get that right, the rest should come easier.

What’s your next great survey going to look like?

You can find out more about WWF’s innovation work here and see the 2024 Innovation@WWF team impact report here.

Innovation can transform organizations, driving them towards sustainability and greater impact. However, achieving innovation consistently requires a structured approach and a shared language.

This article provides a comprehensive guide to creating a framework for evaluating and fostering innovation within organizations, based on insights from the Innovation@WWF team’s structured approach to defining and setting innovation criteria.

The Importance of a Shared Language in Innovation

The Innovation@WWF team found that without shared language, it was hard to make judgements about which projects were innovative or which examples to feature as an innovation impact story within the network. This led to their creation of a shared language and innovation criteria. Below are key learnings and suggestions based on the team’s process.

A shared language in innovation serves as a foundation for consistent communication, collaboration and evaluation. It ensures that all team members have a common understanding of what innovation means, why it is essential and how it can be achieved. Without a common vocabulary, efforts can become fragmented, leading to miscommunication and missed opportunities.

Key Components of a Shared Language:

1. Definitions: Clearly define what innovation means within your organization. For WWF, innovation is the implementation of a novel idea to make something substantially better for people and the planet. This includes physical products, better processes, unique collaborations, or the reconfiguration of existing solutions.
2. Values: Align innovation with the organization’s core values. At WWF, these are Courage, Respect, Integrity, and Collaboration.
3. Purpose: Communicate the purpose of the innovation criteria, which is to provide a clear and consistent framework for evaluating new ideas and projects.
4. Establishing Innovation Criteria: Innovation criteria are essential for systematically assessing and nurturing innovative ideas. They provide a structured way to evaluate the potential and impact of new ideas, ensuring that resources are allocated to the most promising projects.

Steps to Establish Innovation Criteria:

Once you have identified and implemented steps 1 to 3 you can dive into establishing your innovation criteria.

1. Identify Key Dimensions: Create key themes that an innovation would embody. WWF’s approach uses criteria that is grouped into the following dimensions:

Impact: Assess the potential positive impact on people and the planet.
Scalability: Determine whether the idea has the potential to scale effectively.
Uniqueness: Evaluate if the idea is unique in the market.
Feasibility: Consider the practical aspects of implementation, including resources, time, technology and cultural acceptance.

2. Develop Specific Questions: Create specific questions under each dimension to guide the evaluation process. For example:

Impact: Does the idea significantly improve current practices or outcomes.
Scalability: Can the idea be replicated or expanded to other contexts?
Uniqueness: What makes the idea stand out from existing solutions?
Feasibility: Do we have the necessary resources and capabilities to implement the idea?

3.Use a Checklist: Develop an innovation checklist to ensure all aspects are considered. WWF’s checklist includes questions on innovation capability, structure, and specific criteria like team training, budget, and Theory of Change.

4. Implementing the Innovation Framework: Once the criteria and checklist are established, a stakeholder feedback process undergone and edits made, the next step is to implement the framework within the organization.

Steps to Implementation:

Below are suggested steps to successfully implement the innovation criteria into an organization and ones taken by WWF in their own journey.

1. Train the Team: Ensure that all team members understand the innovation criteria and how to use the checklist. Training sessions and workshops can be effective for this purpose.
2. Integrate into Processes: Embed the innovation criteria into the organization’s project evaluation and development processes. This ensures that every new idea is assessed systematically.
3. Collect Feedback: Regularly collect feedback from team members and key stakeholders on the effectiveness of the criteria and checklist.
4. Iterate and Improve: Use the feedback to refine and improve the innovation criteria and checklist. Innovation is an evolving process, and the criteria should be flexible to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.
5. Evaluating Innovation Success: To evaluate the success of innovation efforts, it is crucial to establish metrics and benchmarks.

Key Metrics for Evaluation:

As an innovation takes flight, it’s important to evaluate it over time. You can use the innovation criteria as a guide to do this. Below are suggestions of metrics to keep track of.

• Impact Metrics: Measure the positive changes brought about by the innovation. This can include environmental impact, social benefits and economic gains.
• Scalability Metrics: Assess the extent to which the innovation has been replicated or expanded. This includes geographical spread, adoption rates and scalability challenges.
• Uniqueness Metrics: Evaluate the market differentiation and competitive advantage of the innovation.
• Feasibility Metrics: Track the implementation process, including resource utilization, timelines, technological integration and team adoption.

Conclusion

Establishing a shared language and clear criteria for innovation is essential for fostering a culture of creativity and continuous improvement within organizations. By following a structured approach, as demonstrated by WWF, organizations can systematically evaluate and nurture innovative ideas, leading to impactful and sustainable growth.

Innovation is not just about having great ideas; it is about putting those ideas into action in a way that aligns with organizational values and objectives. With a shared language and robust criteria, any organization can unlock its innovative potential and drive meaningful change.

While collaborating with WWF’s global innovation team, we spent a lot of our time enabling WWF staff to innovatively solve today’s conservation challenges. Recently, we started questioning if innovating to solve today’s problems is doing enough to deliver long-lasting conservation impact. What if our innovative solutions can go on to make a positive impact beyond today? How do we design solutions that are innovative and future-proof?

Short-term thinking is becoming an existential threat

With these questions in mind we set out to introduce the practice of Futures Thinking (or Future Foresight) at WWF. According to the folks at the Long Time Project, “short-term thinking is rapidly becoming an existential threat to humanity”.

I adapted this to WWF by saying, short-term thinking is becoming an existential threat to everything living on earth; humans, animals, plants. This often caught colleagues’ attention. This — and the invite to learn how to time-travel. Because that sounds like fun, right?

Time-traveling to inspire bold(er) action, today

Besides the urgent need for long-term thinking and doing (to ensure our solutions remain relevant for longer), we learned that by immersing ourselves into the future, we (mentally) prepare for what’s to come. As an introduction to Futures Thinking, we invited colleagues (pandas) to travel in time — into the future. We took them onto journeys into their own (personal) futures. We did this by either asking them to imagine their morning routine for different moments in time (inspired by an example from futurist Jane McGonigal) — or by guiding them into the past and the future through a narrated meditation. Having taken more than 300 colleagues on journeys into their futures — people always concluded that by having traveled into their futures, they identified actions they wanted to take today.

Scenario immersions to build resilience

Once we explored our personal futures, it was time to step into various scenarios of the future. We, with the help of chatGPT, created future scenarios around themes such as nature rights (earth as a stakeholder), extreme weather events and climate action. We also invited people into (imaginary) sensory techtopias, metamorphic cities and robot-ruled worlds. Through storytelling and questioning, people imagined their thoughts, feelings, decisions and actions in different versions of the future. By immersing into various scenarios, resilience is being built. Once a variation of a scenario does happen in the future, we will feel more prepared by having imagined it before. Beyond building resilience, people always shared they took insights ‘from the future’ that they could act upon in their daily roles.

Future-proof ideation

More teams wanted to take their new time-traveling skills to the next level. In response, we designed future-proof ideation sessions. Beyond immersions into personal futures or future scenarios, we introduced teams to trends impacting their area of work. We then invited them to bring current approaches/initiatives/programs they wanted to ‘future-proof’. From there, we mixed and matched current ways of doing, with trends. We piloted this with fundraising teams at first. For example, a fundraising team wanted to think of new ways to attract one-off donations. So, we took the topic of one-off donations and combined that with the trend of ‘impactainment’. We took ten minutes to think of as many crazy new ideas using this combo. We then paired one-off donations with the trend of climate-adaptive lives.

Next up, we would take the topic of corporate partnerships and pair it with the trend of symbiotic tech, or post-human narratives. Getting flirty with trends has proven to be a great way to get unstuck with some of today’s (fundraising) challenges. And — it opened up a new ideation form, one where we think up ideas that are future-proof. We now run these sessions with teams across the organization, from fundraising to conservation teams, and communication to finance teams.

Our journey has only just begun

Everything we do today has an impact on our futures. Future thinking has proven very helpful to expand our solutions’ impact timelines. It’s also aiding us think up more future-proof ways of working. And — it’s mentally preparing us for what’s ahead, building more resilient teams. Our time-traveling exercises, scenario immersions and future-proof ideation sessions are just a start on our journey to Futures Thinking. We’d love to hear how you are bringing long-term thinking and acting to your organization.

For our Futures work at WWF, we’ve taken inspiration from both the Long Time Project and Jane McGonigal’s future research that she summarizes in her book Unimaginable.

This article explores different metrics and methodologies for measuring the impact of innovation and shares challenges and opportunities involved in evaluating the outcomes of innovative initiatives.

Innovation is a key behaviour held by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The innovation@WWF team goal is to grow WWF’s innovation culture across its 85 offices and amplify the uptake of innovation methodology for conservation. While collaborating with the WWF’s innovation team, I spent the last two years trying to understand how to best measure the impact of innovation. This journey has come with many successes and failures. I am excited to share these learnings with you and walk you through our process of measurement. Let’s dive in!

I hold the firm belief that embedding innovation into an organisation’s ways of working, culture and strategy can lead to greater impact and in WWF’s case, greater conservation impact. Testing out this belief and measuring the impact of it is the challenging part. And as always, before you can start to measure something, you have to have a shared understanding of what it means. WWF’s definition of innovation goes like this:

Assuming you agree that innovation has a big role in increasing impact for people and the planet, it becomes crucial for us to measure it. After all, the only way organisations can truly know how to improve, learn or make informed decisions is by measuring what matters; in this case the impact of practising innovation. And while measurement of innovation is challenging, it is not impossible. We need to include measurement and evaluation in our innovation strategy as well as project design.

Setting an Impact Strategy

A best practice for any impact measurement work starts with a Theory of Change and a deep understanding of your stakeholders. Scotland CAN B defines a stakeholder as ”any entity (person, group, place, or otherwise) which can impact or be impacted by an organisation’s actions, objectives and policies.”

A Theory of Change is a description or illustration of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. In other words, how an organisation or project believes it is making a difference or a change with/for their stakeholders. Check out our example by reading through WWF’s Innovation’s Theory of Change below.

Measurement Definitions

A Theory of Change outlines key pieces of an impact strategy and contains valuable information that acts as a blueprint to know what to measure and when. To better understand some of the key elements of a Theory of Change, I highlighted some brief definitions of each below (adapted from B Lab and Social Enterprise Academy):

Creating Innovation KPIs

When looking to measure and test your strategy, setting strong KPIs is vital. Measuring impact related to innovation requires specific KPIs that touch on various aspects of your Theory of Change. Before we outline what some of these KPIs are, it’s helpful to understand some best practices related to KPIs and how to have a healthy mix of types of KPIs in your measurement plan.

To start, all KPIs should contain the following characteristics:

1. Quantifiable and actionable- can be measured & monitored
2. Tied to a key outcome — aligned to your Theory of Change and mapped to a stakeholder/s
3. Clear and applied consistently — defined with shared understanding

It’s also important to have a healthy mix of different types to ensure the data tells a holistic story. The KPIs suggested below go beyond the common innovation KPI of Return on Innovation Investment.

When measuring the impact of innovation, VIIMA groups KPIs into five main categories. The KPI examples shared below are unique ones currently being used and tracked by WWF’s innovation team.

1. Measuring innovation related to capabilities

These KPIs measure the talent, competency and skills related to innovative ways of working and innovation tools.

KPI Examples tracked by WWF:

• # of people who complete innovation training
• # of people who are aware of innovation principles and tools
• % of office that has the ability to apply innovation principles and tools to their work
• Assessment of innovation skills and abilities

2. Measuring innovation related to structures

These KPIs measure the process and infrastructure that support an organisation’s ability to innovate and how it strengthens an organisation’s culture.

KPI Examples tracked by WWF:

• Amount or % of dedicated funding for innovation
• Cycle time in the innovation pipeline
• % of time dedicated to innovation
• % WWF staff/offices engaged in innovation work

3. Measuring innovation related to culture

These KPIs measure the mindset, culture, and collaboration across an organisation to allow for sustained innovation.

KPI Examples tracked by WWF:

• Perception of the innovation level of WWF by employees (and how this changes over time)
• # of each innovation persona in WWF (innovator, supporter, etc.)
• # of new ideas or innovative projects and in what stage (ideation, scaling, etc.)
• # of times innovation learning is applied to projects

4. Measuring innovation related to strategy & leadership

These KPIs measure how an organisation embeds innovation into strategy and goals and the embracement of leadership of it.

KPI Examples tracked by WWF:

• Instances of innovation present in written strategy
• % of management time spent on innovation
• # of leaders taking innovation training
• Comfort Level with risk and failure

Measuring innovation related to final product and services

These KPIs measure the overall results or impact of the work done.

KPI Examples tracked by WWF:

• # of new ideas launched
• Conservation impact generated from projects
• Time saved and now dedicated to WWF’s mission-critical activities
• % of projects scaled or replicate

Once KPIs are chosen, the next step is to set SMART goals to help you understand what you need to measure, who to engage in the evaluation process, and a clear way to reflect on if your project or strategy is achieving what it is set out to do.

Methods for Measuring

Once you have strong KPIs and goals that link to your Theory of Change, the next steps include:

1. Gathering information via surveys, interviews, and innovative methods suggested below
2. Analysing the data gathered
3. Evaluating the results

Innovation can be used when measuring KPIs to ensure it is an enjoyable experience for stakeholders, is effective, and gathers rich and useful data to depict a holistic reality of your work. To avoid survey-fatigue, try out new measurement methods such as gamifying quizzes, photovoice, and interactive activities such as Where Do You Stand? or focus groups. Where possible embed your measurement methods into existing meetings, interactions, or processes by using online tools such as Mural and TypeForm.

Your first year of measurement data will act as your baseline year; the year you compare to see the changes made over time. In order to track impact and long-term outcomes, you will need multiple sets of data to compare. Having a centralised database to record and store your impact data and conclusions made will make it easier when transitions on the team occur and to draw learnings from changes over time. The magic happens when you can review, compare, and reflect on your data to help you answer questions like:

Impact measurement is a cyclical process. By reviewing results and data on a regular basis, we can learn, reflect and grow. Setting up a good strategy and process for measuring innovation allows you to repeat it each year, while making necessary changes and edits as you learn from your failures and successes.

Learnings From WWF

We started measuring the impact of our innovation work two years ago. This includes introducing an annual network-wide innovation survey, a world tour of deep dive interviews with country offices on innovation culture and ways of working, and project-level KPI tracking for all innovation initiatives. We are already putting our learnings into practice. Here are a few to share:

• Survey fatigue is real. Be thoughtful about the timing of your survey, length, and audience. Spend time on the “why” and include a fun aspect such as a competition or prize for those who complete it. We had over 1,000 WWF employee responses from our first annual 2022 survey and 1,100 in 2023!!
• Measurement is a team-wide task. It is important that all feel connected to the KPIs tracked for their work and have an easy-to-understand and light-touch way to record the outputs and outcomes of them. The innovation team at WWF does this by using a shareable impact dashboard where each workstream owner leads on the measurement of their KPIs in a format that all can see the work of the team.
• Share learnings and failures often. Over time, we found the importance of sharing learnings and data with each other and using this information to inform related projects. We reflect and share learnings monthly and have a Slack channel dedicated to this topic.
• How you share your impact will depend on the audience/stakeholder. We created innovation impact reports for each office and region within WWF, as well as a larger internal report, short infographic, and external slides. We measure impact to learn from it and therefore we should share this impact in a way that is most useful to the stakeholder we are engaging with.
• And finally, impact measurement is a culture. It is not a task to be completed by one person, but rather a culture that the organisation and project teams need to embrace. If we want to create a positive conservation impact, we have to have a way to track it. Innovation is a key part of social and environmental-driven work and by tracking its impact we can learn, scale, and replicate faster.

Business as usual will not be enough to bend the curves for people and the planet; we need innovative solutions. And we need to measure the impact of innovation and share our failures and learnings as they come.

‘Scaling’ is a really complex topic. There is a lot of ambiguity and not a lot of alignment when it comes to definitions, preferred scaling pathways and ways to design for impact at scale. This Scaling for Impact Article series by the Innovation@WWF Team will break down these concepts and approaches, demonstrating how they can be and have been applied within WWF.

To get started and lay the foundation for more complex concepts later on, this article will cover the basics of scaling. Starting with, ‘what does ‘scaling’ even mean?

The Difference Between Growth and Scale:

It’s not unusual for people to use the words ‘growth’ and ‘scale’ interchangeably. However, they actually mean different things:

Growth: Increasing the size of your output, usually necessitating an increase in the size of your input.
Scale: Increasing the size of your output without proportionally increasing costs or other inputs. It’s about maximising efficiency.

To explain the difference, let’s turn to an example:

Imagine a project focused on planting trees to combat deforestation.

Growth: If the organisation wants to increase the number of trees they plant, they might need to hire more staff, purchase more saplings, and expand their operations to new areas. This means that as the number of trees planted (output) increases, the costs and resources (input) also increase. If they double the number of trees they plant, they might need to double their staff and resources, resulting in proportional growth.

Scale: On the other hand, if the organisation wants to scale, they might develop partnerships with local communities to encourage volunteer planting, use drones for more efficient planting methods, or create an educational campaign to inspire public participation. By doing this, they can increase the number of trees planted without needing to hire additional staff or significantly increase other costs. This results in a larger output without a proportional increase in input, demonstrating the concept of scaling.

In a sector impacted by limited funding, scaling can be seen as perhaps the most important way for social and environmental impact organisations to meet their ambitious goals due to its focus on maximising efficiency — having more impact with fewer resources and on shorter timelines.

Different Strategies for Scaling:

Scaling Out: This is the route most often thought of as ‘scaling’ in the social sector. This is when an organisation successfully replicates a particular social or environmental innovation in different communities or landscapes, in order to reach greater numbers of people. An example would be a WWF Philippines Team that develops a coral reef restoration approach that proves to increase biodiversity and they replicate this model across multiple coastal communities in South East Asia.

Scaling Up: This is the route to changing policy or impacting laws, to change the broader institutional ‘rules of the game’. An example would be A conservation NGO that successfully lobbies for changes in national wildlife protection laws, resulting in a legal framework that specifically safeguards critical habitats for endangered species.

Scaling Deep: This refers to changing the deeper values, cultural beliefs, meanings and practices of people to bring about change. This is a really tough and time consuming approach — but essential for systemic change. A lot of WWFs Inclusive Conservation work will sit here.

NOTE: successfully scaled projects will probably include a combination of these strategies. For example, a project protecting mangroves might develop a successful approach to restoration in a coastal area, improving biodiversity and protecting shorelines. If they replicate this model across multiple coastal regions in Southeast Asia, they are scaling out. If they simultaneously lobby for changes in national policies to protect mangrove forests, they are attempting to scale up. If they were to also run an educational campaign for schools and community leaders to change local attitudes towards mangroves, highlighting their importance for coastal protection and marine life, they are scaling deep.

What Does ‘Scaling’ Look Like in Practice?

The above strategies can be quite abstract. To make it more practical, we can look at different approaches to scaling. Our friends at The Nature Conservancy have done the work of explaining these different approaches in depth in their Designing for Scale Report. They have included great checklists for each approach to see which is best for you with links to further reading on each one.

Scaling approaches can be divided in 3 categories:

1. Product orientation: getting a programme/ method/ tool to a targeted group of users
2. Partnership orientation: where you have a common problem that is likely to be best addressed if different parties work together
3. Influence Orientation: where the required knowledge is largely in-place but there are barriers that must be removed or conditions that need to be in place to enable change.

For now, we will do a deep dive into one approach to scaling that falls into the ‘product orientation’ category: replication.

Scaling via Replication:

Replication involves copying a “model” or programme that has been shown to be effective, with the expectation that it can or will produce the same or comparable results in different places. This is a common approach within WWF and the broader social and environmental impact sector.

In the below image you can see how scaling via replication usually falls within our existing project evolution lifecycle — even if you haven’t used the term ‘replication’ before.

With this lens, you can see how the various project maturity stages lead you from a good idea, to a fully scaled project:

EMERGING:

1. Ideation and Research & Development: The foundation stage of developing a project where innovators are digging into the details of the problem, using creativity and brainstorming to come up with ideas, researching existing solutions, potentially meeting with stakeholders to get multiple perspectives and ultimately starting to frame a potential solution.

VALIDATING:

2. Proof of Concept: an exercise to test the real-world potential of an incomplete idea. It does not deliver the idea for live use but demonstrates whether it is at the very least feasible in a lab setting, simulated environment, or with a small group of potential end-users. At this stage you might develop a prototype to validate the design and usability of your solution. A prototype is a very rough draft and some elements of the solution might be missing.
3. Piloting: extends the testing of the solution into actual conditions that mirror the environment of final implementation. This stage examines the functionality and the challenges the project may face when used by the intended audience. While the pilot project should have most of its functionality in place, it is usually limited in scope in some way, either in terms of numbers of stakeholders, geographical reach or limited functionality.

SCALE:

4. Internal Replication: taking a proven model from the pilot stage and replicating it within other parts of the organisation to assess its adaptability and robustness across different settings. This stage involves implementing the project in diverse locations or departments within the organisation, maintaining the core elements while adapting to local contexts. It tests the model’s consistency and the organisation’s ability to replicate success effectively.
5. External Replication: the model is implemented outside the original organisation. This involves partnerships with other entities, adaptation to broader market conditions, and scaling across different geographies. The project must maintain its core effectiveness while being flexible enough to accommodate external variations. This stage tests the solution’s ultimate scalability and impact potential on a regional, national, or even global scale, ensuring it can deliver consistent results in diverse environments.

Moving Through Project Stages Towards Scale:

The way that organisations typically support projects through their progression can make us think that it should be a linear process. They make us believe that we should come up with an idea, get funding to test it, and unless the project outright fails, we should start looking for scale funding straight away.

In the world of innovation, this is not realistic. In reality, distilling out a scalable idea takes many rounds of testing and funding and iterating and retesting… and projects need the funding and time and security to go through this process if we are going to see successfully scaled solutions. Each step will involve a series of evaluations to determine whether an idea is:

Option A: An outright failure. The idea is disproven, learnings should be harvested and the project ditched.
Option B: Needs iteration. The idea has some promise but there are elements that need to be reworked and retested before we can decide whether it works or not.
Option C: Enough to progress. The idea has tested really well and we have evidence-backed reason to believe that it can be scaled further.

Deciding to pursue scale:

In deciding whether an idea is ‘enough’ to progress, there are four ‘enoughs’ to consider (which you can read more about in kevin Starrs article linked below):

“Good Enough” — Is the Big Idea worth pursuing?

‘‘Big Enough” — Is the Big Idea sizable enough, given the overall scale of the problem?

“Simple Enough” — Is the Big Idea simple enough for the doers to implement effectively?

“Cost-Effective Enough” — Is the Big Idea cost-effective enough to interest a payer-at-scale?

To make this more concrete, let’s consider the mangrove restoration example:

Scenario A:

• Good Enough? Mangrove restoration significantly improves coastal biodiversity and protects shorelines from erosion. The impact is well-documented, and there is high demand in coastal regions.
• Big Enough? The project addresses large-scale coastal degradation issues and can be adapted to different coastal environments. It can overcome constraints like varying local conditions.
• Simple Enough? The core activities include planting mangroves and community engagement, which are straightforward. Local stakeholders can be easily trained to implement these activities.
• Cost-Effective Enough? The project is cost-effective, fitting within budgets of local governments and NGOs, often costing less than existing coastal protection measures.

Conclusion: This project ticks all the boxes to be considered ‘enough’ to pursue scale.

Scenario B:

• Good Enough? The impact of the mangrove restoration project is limited to small, localised areas. Evidence of significant improvement in biodiversity and coastal protection is sparse, and demand is minimal.
• Big Enough? The project’s scope is too narrow, addressing only a few specific coastal regions without potential for broader application. It cannot be easily adapted to different environmental contexts.
• Simple Enough? The project involves complex procedures that require specialised knowledge and equipment, making it difficult for local stakeholders to implement effectively without extensive training and support.
• Cost-Effective Enough? The costs of the project are high, requiring expensive materials and ongoing maintenance. It exceeds the budgets of local governments and NGOs, making it financially unsustainable for broader replication.

Conclusion: This project raises significant concerns and would not be considered ‘enough’ to pursue scale.

Scaling is crucial for achieving significant social and environmental impact, especially in a world with limited resources. Understanding the difference between growth and scale, and the strategies and approaches to scaling, is essential for successfully expanding the reach and effectiveness of conservation efforts. In future articles, we will delve deeper into other scaling approaches and explore real-world examples of successful scaling initiatives. Stay tuned for more insights on designing for scale and overcoming common challenges in the journey towards impactful scaling.

SOURCES:

• Scaling Out, Scaling Up, Scaling Deep Strategies of Non-profits in Advancing Systemic Social Innovation
• The Nature Conservancy: Designing for Scale Report.
• Big enough, simple enough, cheap enough