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Design your Core • Spring Impact

Social Impact at Scale

Strategy

Design your Core

Define the essential elements that drive your impact and sustainability

Time

60-90 minutes

Materials

Pen and paper
Sticky notes

How will this tool help?

The ‘core’ refers to the set of essential features or ‘ingredients’ that you need to scale in order to meet your intended impact (or the change you want to achieve).

To scale-up through working with others, be that your team, partners or wider stakeholders, you will need to define your core clearly. Think of it as a recipe that others can use to deliver your solution at scale and achieve the same results.

This tool will help you design your core by equipping you with a recipe for impact at scale.

Watch the video case study below to understand how CHDC have applied this tool in practice

Before you proceed

You should already know your 'intended impact' before using this tool.

Head to the tool

Intended Impact

Clarify the change you want to achieve to address a societal problem at scale

STEP-BY-STEP

To work on the tool worksheet, follow these steps:
Make a copy to your own Google Drive folder: click file > make a copy > entire presentation > select your personal drive folder, OR
Download a copy to your desktop: click file > download > Microsoft Word (or other file type)

© Spring Impact. [2025]. Any use of this material must be attributed to Spring Impact.

Open worksheet

Step 1

Start by bringing in your intended impact to guide your thinking and use this to decide what it is you’re scaling.

Think critically about what you are scaling – is it values and principles, a programme, a campaign? We use the word solution below to indicate the ‘thing’ whose impact is being scaled.

Is it a programme? For example, CHDC scaled a community-based parenting programme to meet their intended impact of supporting individual families and wider communities in the early prevention of violence against children and gender-based violence. Read more about the CHDC case study here.

Is it an approach? Social Bite’s Jobs First programme provides real jobs and extensive wrap around support to people who have experienced homelessness. This enables them to develop their skills, strengths and confidence and to contribute to society. Social Bite identified that their person-centred approach to supporting constituents was the ‘core’ they needed to scale, not the entire programme.

Is it a campaign? Campaign messages such as ‘ending the use of single use plastics to tackle climate change’ have been successful around the world in reducing pollution.

Step 2

Work through this worksheet designed to help you narrow down your essential ingredients.

Design your core recipe by dividing the ingredients of your solution into:

Essential ingredients – elements that you absolutely need to have to achieve your intended impact
Non-essential ingredients – elements that are nice to have.

Tip:

Examples of the 'ingredients' you need may include: (1) the values that underpin your solution; (2) processes that support your solution; (3) key messages or tactics (i.e the social action activities used to achieve the a campaign’s goals).

Step 3

Now challenge yourself to consider why different ingredients are essential.

Tip:

Our tendency is to make our programmes, campaigns or services as good as possible, so we fill them with all of the things we think will make them better. However, the more we put in there, the more complex it becomes. This makes for a more difficult or expensive recipe for others to follow, which makes it less scalable.

Step 4

Dive deeper into the essential ingredients. What must be ‘exact’ or delivered in precisely the same way? What can be flexible to allow for adaptations depending on context?

For example, if you are scaling a campaign, the message of the campaign must be exact to create its intended impact, but how local campaigners choose to deliver the messages can be flexible – be it through a public protest or through handing out pamphlets.

Tip:

Here is another example of flexible ingredients. Say you are running a training programme for young people - the topics of the training sessions will have to be exact. But how facilitators run the session, for example by including games and icebreakers, can be flexible to allow for local staff to tailor the training programme to their communities.

Step 5

You now have a recipe for your core!

SHARE YOUR FEEDBACK

Want to learn more?

CHDC's journey to scale

On a mission to prevent violence against children and gender-based violence against Uganda, CHDC partnered with Spring Impact to take their Parenting for Respectability (PfR) programme to scale.

On pages 4 and 5 of this case study, you can learn more about how CHDC used the ‘Design your Core’ exercise as a critical starting point on the journey to scale.

Read case study

Want to take the next step on your scaling journey?

Sign up for 'Getting Scale Ready'

This is our 5-week online course designed to help you build the foundations for scale

Find out more

Appears in these Collections

Be financially sustainable

Design your Core

Define the essential elements that drive your impact and sustainability

Sweet spot for scale

Critically assess the scalability of your solution by ensuring it has impact, value and sustainability baked into it.

Doer and Payer at scale

Establish who will deliver your solution and who will pay for it once it's scaled to ensure you're doing it sustainably

Support Packages

Ensure your partners have the skills and knowledge to deliver impact as part of your scaling model

Scale Model Design Requirements

Define your scaling model based on your organisation’s capabilities and your knowledge of the external environment you operate in

Prepare to scale up

Scale Readiness Diagnostic

Assess your scale readiness and address areas for improvement

Design your Core

Define the essential elements that drive your impact and sustainability

Sweet spot for scale

Critically assess the scalability of your solution by ensuring it has impact, value and sustainability baked into it.

Social Objectives

Identify and align your social and organisational objectives

Quality management

Ensure that delivery remains high quality over time

Roles and Responsibilities

Set and assess roles and responsibilities for all partners you intend to work with

Partner Profile

Build strategic alliances by defining partner criteria, instilling confidence in collaborations and mapping potential partners

Project Planning

Create a customisable plan for effective scaling implementation

Alignment Building Facilitation Guide

Unite your organisation around scaling plans

Communication Plan

Communicate your scale model with key stakeholders

Learning Loops

Harness continuous learning to enhance your scaling efforts

Related Tools

Social Objectives

Identify and align your social and organisational objectives

Problem Definition

Clearly define the societal problem you want to address at scale

Intended Impact

Clarify the change you want to achieve to address a societal problem at scale

Choosing a scale pathway

From replication to building a movement - explore different pathways to scaling impact

Identify risky assumptions

Identify risky assumptions within your strategy, model or solution and prioritise which you should test first.

Building a Storyboard

Draft a map to achieve your intended impact at scale

Critical Rates & Rough Costs Calculator

A calculator to help you have the greatest potential of creating impact at scale

Learning Roadmap & Tracker

Reduce risk and accelerate learning as quickly as possible by testing your assumptions

Sweet spot for scale

Critically assess the scalability of your solution by ensuring it has impact, value and sustainability baked into it.

Doer and Payer at scale

Establish who will deliver your solution and who will pay for it once it's scaled to ensure you're doing it sustainably

Partner Profile

Build strategic alliances by defining partner criteria, instilling confidence in collaborations and mapping potential partners

Roles and Responsibilities

Set and assess roles and responsibilities for all partners you intend to work with