A new report from Social Ventures Australia (SVA) shares frameworks that aim to help successful social initiatives achieve greater scale and broader impact.  

Alarming new trends such as heightened loneliness and psychological distress, revealed by the recent Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report, spotlight a handful of the many challenges that Australia’s social sector is working to address and the need for pathways to help successful social initiatives have a positive impact on the lives of more Australians. 

“When we are faced with large-scale challenges as a society, we need to create large-scale solutions,” said Suzie Riddell, SVA CEO. 

“By designing these solutions for this large impact or taking the right existing initiatives and scaling them effectively, we can meet the needs of more people and see a more efficient investment of program funds.” 

Bringing together insight from over 400 leaders driving social change, the Impact at Scale Report reveals the key enablers and barriers to achieving impact at scale. Almost four in five (78%) not-for-profit leaders revealed they do not have the funding required to achieve impact at scale and only one in four (25%) have the required resourcing to work towards achieving impact at scale.  

The report is part of a broader initiative by SVA to identify and overcome these challenges in the Australian context to achieve impact at scale. 

“Australia is set to experience some huge opportunities for applying impact at scale.” 

According to Riddell, with major changes on the horizon for the NDIS and Workforce Australia, as well as the government’s commitment to universal childcare, now is the perfect time to rally as a social impact sector.  

“By applying this expertise that enables large-scale design, we can support these reforms and create lasting change for people who need support,” said Riddell. 

“We do know though that achieving impact at scale is tough going.” 

Riddell highlighted that many leaders in the sector are still working to understand the complexities of achieving this and said that it requires perseverance and problem-solving. 

“A variety of perspectives and approaches and it is a collaborative effort.” 

The CEO added that they created the Impact at Scale Report to contribute to the ongoing conversation and provide tangible examples and frameworks to aid these leaders in transforming promising ideas into widespread impact.