We enter 2025 in a period of frenetic change and intense debate about the future of American government. Society’s future is balanced on a knife’s edge. Climate change is pushing past critical thresholds. AI is reshaping the very nature of work and knowledge. Democratic institutions face unprecedented and global pressures. We believe that in each of these areas, the social sector will help determine which way we fall – into equitable prosperity or deeper trouble. In the face of these challenges, every institution in the social sector, including ours, can and should reconsider how to maximize our impact.
Scaling Impact to Meet the Moment
We need a bold and visionary social sector that can work holistically and at scale. In the private sector, success follows a fairly predictable pattern that rapidly grows winning ideas. Profits drive investment, investment fuels growth, and eventually, winning solutions reshape entire industries. It’s not easy, but at least the pathway is clear. The social sector presents a different paradigm entirely.
Aggregating philanthropic capital to scale social impact sometimes feels like pushing magnetic north poles together. Funders want to pursue unique, legacy-defining impact. Nonprofits need to stay true to their missions while growing their reach. Communities need solutions that reflect their voices and values. Aligning these forces is the real work. And that work is no more vital than it is right now, when civil society is called into new roles in American public life.
Over 20 years of consulting in the social sector, we’ve learned that achieving scale isn’t about magic recipes or silver bullets, but about the consistent application of some core principles. We have learned sustainable change requires three things to work in concert:
- Rigorous analysis to help design and prioritize solutions
- Inclusive engagement that builds trust and alignment, especially through moments of change
- Know-how that combines technical expertise with adaptive flexibility to implement solutions effectively and engage stakeholders more deeply
Our most impactful work intertwines these three strands. For example:
- The Project Finance for Permanence model that’s protected millions of acres of critical ecosystems by aligning multiple stakeholders around sustainable funding mechanisms
- The Educational Resources Impact Fund that’s scaling evidence-based learning materials by creating shared infrastructure for development and distribution
- The Ouagadougou Partnership that’s transformed reproductive health access across West Africa through collaborative action
None of these succeeded through traditional “scaling” approaches. They required new ways of thinking about how to achieve impact — ways that combine analytical precision with deep stakeholder engagement in contexts that are more dynamic than individual nonprofit organizations pursuing growth in isolation.
Our 2025 Roadmap
Throughout 2025, we’ll be exploring three critical themes that we believe will shape the future of social impact in this moment. Progress against these three themes will help the social sector move more decisively and with greater impact, responding to change and crisis with clarity of action and effectiveness. In the face of change and uncertainty, action can feel dangerous, but it is also essential.
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Integrating Knowledge to Democratize Decision-Making
It is time to use social sector’s embrace of lived experience and community knowledge to develop strategies that are both more inclusive and faster to impact. The last 20 years’ explosion in quantitative data collection and analysis has had benefits but also aptly demonstrated that numbers alone can mislead without the rich context of community understanding and qualitative insights. This convergence of community wisdom with sophisticated data analysis creates new possibilities for more equitable and effective decision-making.
Drawing from our analytical heritage and deep stakeholder engagement expertise, we are developing approaches that help organizations harness these complementary sources of knowledge. Statistical tools that have existed primarily on the margins of social sector work—often confined to narrow machine learning applications or academic research—can now be deployed to bridge community voices with quantitative analysis, enriching both. Ultimately, we want organizations to make better decisions more quickly.
The key is developing frameworks that value and incorporate both quantitative and qualitative insights without privileging one over the other. When community knowledge informs how we collect, analyze and interpret data, we can avoid the pitfalls of decontextualized analysis that can lead to inequitable outcomes. By bringing sophisticated yet accessible statistical approaches into mainstream social sector practice, we can create and accelerate feedback loops that strengthen both community voice and data-driven decision-making.
We’ll investigate:
- Combining data with lived experience
- Creating inclusive decision-making processes
- Building shared measurement systems
- Empowering community voice
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Transforming How Capital Flows
The rapid cuts in federal funding for key issues aptly demonstrate the risks of philanthropic funding strategies that emphasize gap-filling over problem solving. Simply put, most gaps are far too deep for any foundation to adequately fill on its own, especially if every foundation takes as its mission filling gaps rather than funding behind others. While innovation remains crucial, the greatest philanthropic leverage often comes from pooling resources to scale what works. This requires shifting from a “pioneer” mindset to one that embraces coordination across funding sources to aggregate more capital.
We’re seeing a growing recognition that ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) and family offices want to deploy capital against well-developed strategies rather than create everything from scratch. Meanwhile, institutional funders are learning to operate more like orchestrators than inventors. This convergence creates opportunities for creative deal-making that scale up the solutions and long-standing collaborations that already exist, maintaining long-term capacity while having flexibility to significantly increase spending when opportunities arise.
Drawing from decades of experience with both established institutions and emerging philanthropic entities, we’ve developed approaches for identifying and executing these force-multiplier moments. This isn’t just about matching funds — it’s about creating coordinated funding ecosystems that can rapidly scale proven solutions and bring “big bets” to more causes more quickly.
We’ll examine new models for:
- Rapidly pooling and deploying resources
- Creating sustainable funding mechanisms
- Building genuine community ownership
- Measuring what really matters
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Building a Scalable Social Sector
The push for scale in the social sector often comes at the cost of organizational sustainability. While funders increasingly recognize the importance of big bets and general operating support, nonprofits need business models that can weather funding fluctuations and support growth. This requires reimagining traditional nonprofit sustainability approaches. Furthermore, it is often the case that the efforts that require scale don’t scale well within organizations, but actually demand multiple organizations to adopt new approaches. We need a social sector where individual organizations are healthy and dynamic, and a sector that can act like a murmuration when necessary: simultaneous, uncoordinated, but coherent action to address challenges.
Drawing from our work over 20 years with nonprofits, we see how organizations can build resilient revenue models that combine earned income, institutional funding, and individual giving. This isn’t just about diversification — it’s about creating business models that align impact with financial sustainability. The key is developing operational infrastructure that can efficiently deploy resources while maintaining program quality. We also have seen how movements across organizations accelerate change and enable action at a scale that’s impossible for individual institutions to achieve, even if they were able to grow rapidly.
The social sector needs new organizational models that can grow without losing their soul. We’ll explore:
- Shifting from scarcity to abundance mindsets
- Creating frameworks for transformative growth
- Building networks between organizations rather than empires
- Maintaining mission through scale
What’s Next
This is just the beginning of a conversation underway in the social sector that we want to join. Throughout 2025, we’ll be sharing insights, frameworks, and practical tools for tackling these challenges. We’ll be learning alongside our clients and partners, documenting what works, and building new approaches together.
The challenges we face as a society are too complex for any single organization to solve alone. As a consulting firm, we know our role: We achieve impact through service to others and their communities. But by bringing together analytical rigor, deep relationships, and practical and empathetic implementation experience, we can help create the conditions for transformative change.
Over the coming months, we’ll be diving deep into each of these themes through:
- Case studies of successful scaling initiatives
- Practical frameworks for implementation
- Conversations with sector leaders
- Tools for measuring and accelerating impact
Stay tuned for our first piece on how to enable a swift social sector response to the new administration, coming shortly.
The future of social impact requires new ways of thinking, working, and measuring success. We’re excited to explore these frontiers together.