The world is littered with the burnt-out wrecks of well-meaning people who have tried to take a weak organisation to scale. When the foundations aren’t strong enough, problems are magnified, and a huge amount of energy must be wasted in sorting products that are not quite right or systems that fail to deliver. If you’ve ever built and scaled a business, you’d accuse us of stating the obvious here. But when we think about scaling organisations with a social purpose, it’s a lesson that needs to be re-examined within the context of delivering impact. Scaling impact is not simply delivering more products and services through more staff. It’s about understanding precisely what it is that we do to create social value, so that when we start chasing numbers, we don’t lose sight of what matters. The problem is: going to scale can generate its own organisational momentum and gravitational pull on our priorities. Case in point: we’ve seen countless poverty-focused organisations suffer mission drift, when staff start focusing on easier-to-reach (read: less poor) clients in response to cash bonuses that reward rapid growth in client numbers.

Unintended consequences are both ubiquitous and invisible when it comes to the business of doing good. Selia, a woman from Cambodia and intended 'beneficiary' of the Concern Worldwide microcredit programme brings the harsh reality of 'good intentions gone wrong' into view. A new book, The Business of Doing Good, by Anton Simanowitz and Katherine Knotts ventures to explore and solve the problem.

‘Today is the day we feed the ghosts. The monks have been chanting in the temple all night, and by afternoon we’ll meet seven generations of our ancestors as they emerge from the other side. We’ll offer to them prayers and food to ease their suffering, before they disappear again. There are far too many ghosts now, too many gone from our families and villages since my mother’s time. Even those that remain today are somehow half-ghost – a foot or a leg taken – no longer complete humans.’

Impact is now high on the agenda for Third Sector organisations. But how do we ensure that a concern with impact drives real changes in the way that organisations work and the benefits they deliver, rather than just being about measurement and accountability?

Impetus-PEF, in their recent paper Building the Capacity for Impact, argue that Impact Readiness is not just measuring impact but about building organisations that can reliably produce these impacts. This is important, as it means looking at the whole organisation and how it functions, and not just at the products or services they deliver.