Episode 113: The Road to Impact at Scale: Lessons for social entrepreneurs from Mulago CEO, Kevin Starr.

Welcome to the Inspiring Social Entrepreneurs Podcast. My name is Fregel Bern. Every week I talked to inspiring social entrepreneurs and changemakers dedicated to building a better world. Here they tell their stories, the highs and the lows, and share what they have learnt of other social entrepreneurs and changemakers on their journeys. I'm very pleased to date and introduce Kevin Star. Kevin is the founder of Malago Foundation, which funds early-stage social entrepreneurs devoted to maximum impact at scale in developing countries. Kevin set up the Riner Arnold Fellows Programme in 2003 to apply Malago's principles and tools to help social entrepreneurs turn good ideas into lasting change at scale. Kevin also teaches and mentors fellows in numerous programs for social entrepreneurs. So thank you very much, Kevin, for joining me again today on this podcast. We've spoken a few times in the past. I'm very much looking forward to talking to you about the work you do at Malago and in particular how you approach the question of growth and particularly scaling for impact first organizations before we dive into that. Maybe if you could just introduce Malago, Kevin, and yourself, I know what you do. I lead Malago. Malago is a private foundation. We've been in existence for almost 30 years and what we do is find people with what we think is a scalable idea and who have what we think are the chops to take it on the journey and we enroll them as fellows and we teach them design for impact, strategy for scale, behavior change, iteration methods, evidence, fundraising, communications, everything we can to help them be successful. And then we work with them intensively over a year and typically go see them where the work happens and then have another week-long course with them at the end of that time. And then at that point we make a decision as to whether something is a portfolio fit and we fund people as long as we see the potential for exponential change. That's what we're looking for. That's what our portfolio is. That's what we call scalable solutions. Right. Right. And how's it going? How do you evaluate assess your results, what you've done in terms of these goals that you've sat? Well, we think of scale a little differently than most. We think of scale not as a number, but as a curve. And ultimately, achieving scale means to achieve the full potential of your idea, which means that scaling is sustained acceleration. So it is actually hitting that steep part that starts to show exponential change. Right. Right. Now, this question, I guess, of scaling, it seems like it's a special significance for impact for its organizations. I mean, all organizations, more or less, aim for growth. Why is scaling so crucial, do you think, for organizations prioritizing social impact? Well, I can answer for us. It's because the problems are big. The time is short, and the resources are limited. So we want to choose those, find those solutions that are going to make the most of the time and resources we have and actually solve problems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What would you say are some of the unique challenges for impact for us, organizations scaling in your experience, Kevin? The unique challenges. You know, sadly, the most profound challenge is the capriciousness of philanthropy itself. In other words, it doesn't operate like a market, particularly a market for impact. So resources don't reliably flow and efficiently flow toward those most able to create change. And I think of the riskiest thing in a quest for scale is actually other funders. You know, beyond that, the most difficult thing in scaling is the fact that scale really comes from recruiting and enabling others to actually replicate your solution. And that is the single most important key to scale, but obviously it ain't easy. Yes. Well, we can talk about that in a moment. It's a very, I think, important point you make an argument you make about the idea of pairs at scale. And I think that's quite distinctive and really very, very interesting. Another area, it seems from your approach that looks that you highlight, which I think is very interesting. And I'd like to get your thoughts on, is this question of having a big vision from the beginning. And having a vision to make a significant impact, I just spoke to Ned Tosen, Delight, and he throughout the interview emphasized the importance of this, that this was a kind of touchstone for many of the important decisions they made on their journey, but having this lens right at the beginning, which they kept in front of them throughout, for this idea of a big vision. Can you talk about that? Because I guess you can have a big vision, which is maybe we say diluted, or a big vision, which isn't really realistic, and a big vision that is a powerful guide for growth. What is the challenge here? What does it look like? And we just talk about that process of developing this vision of scale, how you're going to get to the size you want, even if it's just a preliminary sense of that, and the overall scale of impact you're looking for. Well, we think of the most important raw material, or a social entrepreneur is an idea and a dream. And we think of dream as sort of a technical term, and that means that a dream is a vision of the full potential of your idea, what would the world would look like if your idea achieved its full potential. And at that kind of scale, who is the doer? Who is actually doing the heavy lifting of replication, which is to say either governments, or NGOs, or in the case of for-profit solutions, businesses? And who's the payer at scale? Typically, beyond philanthropy, we're talking about taxes, or big aid, or customers, in the case, again, of business solutions. And so that's the dream, the full potential of the idea, and a sense of who's doing it at that scale, and who's paying for it at that scale. This question of doer at scale is quite interesting. And I suppose the default for many social entrepreneurs would be that they would do it themselves somehow. What that means, I guess various different models are involved with social franchising, or how they would replicate and so forth, but they might think of it as something they would do themselves. Is that right? Is that slightly default kind of way of looking at it? What does looking at a doer at scale? How does that change things? It seems to be a pretty powerful question because you start to look outside the organization for different kinds of partnerships, collaborations, and other, I guess, organizations that are active in this area, and that you might be able to work with. Well, nobody does it on their own. Really, all you are is a growing organization if you're doing it on your own, and you're never really going to hit and sustain exponential impact. Yeah, I think that's an outmoded notion of what scale is, and it really means that what you're talking about is exponential growth of your organization and exponential growth of your fundraising, and typically, it ends up describing an S-curve where you lose momentum and things flatten out, and we don't. I think there may be some tech based solutions that can sustain a steep curve for a long time but almost without exception, an idea needs to achieve a growing number of doers at scale in order to even approach its full potential. And also separating out the idea of a pair at scale is an important distinction because as it implies the doer may not be the pair and can you give an example of an organization you've worked with Kevin that have gone through this process and just a couple of the key steps and observations and maybe decisions they made about scaling using this kind of way of thinking. Well again when it comes to mind is Musso working in sub-Saharan Africa so they have at the core of their work is an idea best described as professionalizing community health workers. For many years community health workers have been volunteers poorly supported, unpaid, poorly supplied and again and again and again it hasn't worked and so Musso among other organizations came up with this idea of actually making them effective professional frontline health workers. So providing them a salary and certifying them and training them well and mentoring them in the field and assuring that they were supplied with what they needed and assuring that they're in an effective supervisory structure. And they started out in Mali and everybody starts where they start. Every organization has a story often it's just sort of happenstance and in Mali they have ultimately shown that in what turned out to be a war zone they were able to decrease child mortality by 60% and the world experience in war zones in conflict zones is invariably the child mortality goes up and this is an extraordinary achievement and they know they cannot achieve even national scale doing it themselves using philanthropy and so their goal for a long time has been to help the government actually implement create their own professionalized community health workers and progress is slow in Mali Mali is a tough country to work in and it's been embroiled in conflict for quite some time. And so they decided to make sure this idea didn't get bottled up they started working with other governments that were interested initially Cote de Bois where the government has more resources where things are more stable and where the Ministry of Health was quite eager to work in a top-down fashion to make it happen. And so their remusso established a pretty minimal on the ground footprint one district to show that to show the government how it works to prove it out in that country and to provide a base for demonstration and teaching and experimentation to power scale up within Cote de Bois. And then Zambia a country with that has really allocated resources toward this end invited the men to work without a ground presence to help support their government roll out. And so you see how this thing could spread and and pick up momentum and in fact other organizations like living goods and LaWalla and last mile health and a money and integrate all of these other organizations are also making use of this idea and also working in a very deliberate way to help governments deliver it to help governments achieve impact as the doer would scale. Right and how long have you been working with them Cote? Getting on 10 years. Very interesting very interesting. One of the the challenges that's often noted for impact organizations that want to scale is this question of I guess mission drift and the pressures that come on an organization as it grows where it can drift away from its initial focus maybe to more profit making or less risky or other areas that weren't at the heart of their mission. How important a challenge is that do you think what are some of the forces driving that and and how do you deal with that I know some organizations aimed to have measures to assess how close they are to their mission and whether they're keeping it really at their heart and I guess they're the other approaches as well but they'll be interesting to get your perspective on that count. Yeah well I'll just take the notion of mission drift first and mission drift often happens because of a lack of commitment to a very clear mission and the one of the most important tools we have and probably will ever have is what we call the eight word mission statement which is to say I want to know from an organization exactly what they're setting out to do using a verb target population and an outcome and the end outcome is the thing that's actually most important so save kids lives in Molly is a fantastic mission that really focuses an organization on what they do and and if you take a mission that does that clear and a specific idea like professionalized community health workers and a strategy like scaling that up via governments you're likely to stay on track but what often causes mission drift is a sort of a hazy mission in the first place that actually doesn't point you that clearly in a in a specific direction and allows a lot of slop to enter as you pursue things that vaguely seem like a good idea at the time and a strategy that doesn't allow you to make crisp clear decisions as things come up and you know we haven't even talked about measuring yet and how that helps keep you on track but I would say that that the thing that really keeps people aimed in the right direction is clarity about the mission what they're setting out to do the clear articulation of an idea about how they're going to achieve it a dream that sets out what the potential for that idea might be and who's going to be doing it and paying for it at real scale and the fundamental outlines of what's essentially a doer and payer strategy of achieving that dream and if you have those things you tend to stay on track and you can say for example yes to the funders who share that dream or want to help take you there and you can say no to those who are going to get you off track and saying no to money is of course one of the most agonizing decisions of any social entrepreneur. I've spoken to many social entrepreneurs that have found themselves heading where the money is more than they intended because they didn't have any option to stay alive they didn't have any other funding sources and little by little you can go off track. Well I think my experience is actually people with a great idea and the ability to communicate it really well do pretty well with funders there's actually a lot of money out there and I think the biggest single problem in the social sector is people's inability to communicate clearly what they do if you look at a broad sample of websites as we do looking at literally a thousand a year as we try to pick our fellows most of them are awful. At communicating any kind of compelling clear way what they do so there's a lot that can be achieved there But the truth is then a lot of organizations don't have a clear mission and a clear idea anyway and so it's really Hard to engage funders effectively and it's easy to get pulled off track by what funders you're able to find and I think That you mentioned organizations then trying to make money themselves, which is generally a terrible idea because it's a lot easier to get somebody who Knows how to make money to give you some of it than it is to make enough yourself to make a difference All right, that's very interesting very interesting advice cabin you talked about We haven't talked about measurement Is that an important element when when it comes to mission? How do you Your experience what are some useful I guess rules of thumb or ways of approaching that Thinking about keeping track of mission Well, when you when you have a mission that's clear It includes an end outcome that suggests something to measure So save kids lives obviously you want to measure measure child mortality Make kids literate obviously you want to measure their literacy And whether they're achieving grade level So what you need to do to Effectively measure your impact is or things You need to have a clear mission That makes makes that specifies an end outcome and then you need to pick the right metric to To fit that end outcome and then you need to show that it changed a change happened with baseline and an end line with an adequate sample size and with Good state-of-the-art survey methods and then finally you have to show that it was you in other words Your impact is what happened with you minus what would have happened without you What would have happened without you what's what we call the counterfactual and that can be hard to figure out so It might be that you've got a narrative for your before and after where it's clear There wasn't anything else that could have caused that change That that's useful sometimes, but often It's often overused and over relied upon and what you really need in most cases is something to compare your results with And a lot of people use more of what's called the quasi-experimental strategy where they pick something good to compare Their results with like I'm finding a population or a setting that's a good match to know what happens without the intervention and Sometimes you need to go beyond that to techniques like randomization where you're trying to Hool a bunch of people or a bunch of communities or a bunch of schools and then randomly pick half of them to get the intervention and compare that with what happens In those that don't get the intervention because you've created two pools of subjects that are roughly or often Very similar And so we look for those four things in every organization that is trying to achieve A clear and persuasive sense of their own impact Is it expensive to get skilled Input to to do this randomized assessment and so forth or part of the challenges in doing this when you explain it like that It sounds pretty straightforward and yet it does seem to be a perennial question measuring impact and I suppose just throwing in also how that changes as you grow Well, so impact measurement evidence is a journey so You know if you you You begin with your Impact is only theoretical and you've come you put together a logical idea That and is and something that starts to look like a systematic model, but your impact is theoretical And then you start collecting evidence from elsewhere that things like it might have worked and you Start to get some of your own simple early trials that show a difference And then maybe you start to compare that to something you do some other trials maybe not that long maybe not that big Let's start to give you glimpses of of persuasive evidence and you work your way as you grow and as you prepare to scale Toward what you imply which is a rigorous third party often what In the form of what we call a randomized controlled trial that is actually quite expensive But given the stakes is really important because you'd never want to scale something you don't have rigorous when you don't have rigorous evidence of impact And so it's not Especially if an organization builds Impact measurement into its own ongoing monitoring methods It's an integral part of the work and one thing that people often don't appreciate is That without that measurement you have don't have what you need to get better at what you do And so it's actually a necessary part of the work and um You know, I think of it as organizations if they're spending 10% of their work on monitoring and ongoing monitoring and evaluation that's a pretty that's a um Pretty reasonable and necessary uh percentage And then at that some point that that bigger expenditure is um Necessary to make sure that you're scaling up something that's really worth scaling up Yeah, right we can come back to it at that at the moment. It's very interesting. Are you in some of your writings Talk about this idea. I suppose you can call it the the enough Is it a four enough as a good enough big enough simple enough cheap enough Which is quite distinctive and kind of gets to the core of a viable scalable impactful organization or project You're talking about those what they are and uh why you think they're better Well again, this is this is this is our single most important approach to To understanding if an idea And in the model that attached to it is in fact scalable And it depends on identifying your doer and payer at scale and I'll show you why so good enough means Uh, good enough to be worth scaling and for us it has three pieces As a word The first is that you have a consequential effect size in other words Your impact The size of your impact is Enough to really matter in someone's life in other words, you know if you If you increase a kid's literacy by 50 percent But you're coming off of a base of say four words a minute and you get to six words a minute All you've done is make that kid slightly less illiterate Or if you improve a family's income by 30 bucks a year That's nice, but it's not going to change anybody's life And so what we're looking for is Is an impact that's consequential in people's lives And then the second thing is the quality of evidence and I've just kind of described the evidence journey and every organization We we look at is trying to understand scalability and good enough to scale is What is if we think there's going to be consequential impact what is the current quality of the evidence And then the last thing is is We like to we want to make a case for lasting change in other words we don't want to be supporting kind of flash and the pan-ephemeral projects that come in and make a difference and leave, and nothing has changed. So does the impact, can we make the case understanding the idea and the context and how it plays out, that the effect will last, that say somebody whose depression is treated stays healthier, or that a family that starts making more money continues to make more money. And that the service, the education that makes a kid more literate actually continues reliably to be delivered in a well-managed school. And so we want to just make the case for ourselves that that we believe that the impact is going to last. And so that's good enough, and the second is big enough, big enough to matter. And so what we're looking for there is what is the overlap of where this idea is needed and where it would work. And we literally try to that overlap is defines the potential of that idea. And we literally try to make what we call aware it would work list that that starts to identify the characteristics of where this idea actually could be successful. And we think about that in terms of geography, and economy, and legal and policy frameworks, and what kind of expertise is really needed, and the availability of doers, the availability of pairs. We have a whole list of things we go through systematically to try to capture what that overlap between where it's needed and where it would work might look like, and whether we believe this thing has enough potential that we should be interested in it. And that's of course a judgment call, like all these things I suppose. And then the third is simple enough for the doer to do. And you know, this was really important to us because often, I don't know, in the past, we'd look at something and we'd just say, well, we think that's too complicated. And in fact, that was just often an unsupported opinion. And this way of thinking about it helped us understand what too complicated really was. For example, if you have an idea that you say is going to scale up via governments, well, understanding now the definition of simple enough is simple enough for a government to deliver effectively. And you can start assembling evidence toward that end. You can show that the government is starting to do part of it with a lot of effort on your part. That over time, they're able to do a lot more with a smaller effort on your part. And finally, they're able to do the whole thing on their own. And then finally, multiple governments are able to do the whole thing on their own. And you're really off to the races. So you actually can see evidence that you're simple enough. The last is cheap enough. And again, we used to say, oh, that's just too expensive. Or we had more measures of cost effectiveness, cost effectiveness, the actual price of impact. But then we realized that that doesn't matter if the payer isn't willing to pay that. And everybody has a price point, whether it's a mom buying a cook stove or a health or a finance minister deciding on whether a government program should be a priority. And so a good example of the difference between cost effectiveness and cheap enough is clean cook stoves. So it turns out the stoves that are effective enough to actually provide to actually remove prevent enough emissions to make a health difference are quite expensive. And so they might cost 50 to 70 dollars. And the health impacts going forward can be profound when people's lives. And essentially, you know, a verdict, enormous health burden. But nobody's able or willing to pay 70 dollars for a cook stove. We know over experience that 10 to 20 dollars is about all people will spend. And so while from a cost effectiveness point of view, an expensive cook stove is hugely cost effective, the payer can't pay. And so it's too expensive. And so there we have a systematic way to just assess an idea and get clear on that idea over time. And it's how scalable it might be so that sometimes when you do rigorous testing, the idea isn't good enough. And sometimes it turns out that the idea doesn't really work beyond a narrow set of conditions. And it's not big enough. And sometimes it just turns out that you can't recruit and enable others to do it successfully. And it's not simple enough. And other times it proves to be that you can't get it down to the price point that is actually the payer can pay, and it turns out, and that turns to be the obstacle scale. So we are continually working with every organization we fund toward a shared understanding and the achievement of the enoughs. And that is proven to be the most important ongoing major tool of our portfolio management and of our teaching and fellows. Presumably, this isn't internet research, shall we say, or looking up directories and things like this. For many organizations, they need to be active, developing prototypes, engaging with potential customers, or clients, or engaging with potential payers of various kinds, with something to offer them, with something real. And it's part of their it takes time. How long does it take to get good assessments of these variables? Because they they're very simple in a way, very clear. But I can imagine quite a bit of work goes into as you know, for example, the cheap enough, you won't really know until you've started to develop prototype and then thought about it, put it in the hands of people and see how it's been used and try to take away some functionality and that kind of thing. I'm just wondering how should somebody think about these, these kinds of questions and how long it might take or what's necessary to, you know, prove them really? Well, you know, you talk about your focus mostly there and your question, I think about cost. And so what you really need to do is understand your unit costs and where they come from. A lot of organizations don't really understand their unit costs. And then you need to get a target cost and that means really understanding what the pair would pay and doing whatever, whatever sleuthing and investigating and even testing to understand what your pair would pay. And then you have to design toward that price point and then you have to hit that price point and then you have to show that the pair actually will pay it because ultimately that is the measure of cheap enough. And each of those stages can be done deliberately and systematically. But again, often people don't really, where we see people fall short is basics of understanding their unit costs. And then most importantly, trying to think about their do or its scale and what the marginal cost for the do or its scale to deliver it. In other words, for a community health, for primary health care system idea, what would it cost the government per capita to deliver that to its population? That's the cost. That's the price. That's what you have to design toward and that's what you have to eventually hit. But in a case like that, Kevin, maybe they don't know themselves. presumably in many cases, they may not have the kind of data themselves to do that. How would you do that? Well, just like you do in industry, you have, let's say, you have an idea, and you, let's say you have a product that you want people to buy, and this is just, this is the kind of thing one sees in lead startup methods. You create a prototype of that product and get it to work, and then you try to create a minimum viable product that you can offer to people that may cost you a lot more, but allows you to have something that you can test people's true willingness to pay that gives you a sense of, then what you have to refine toward and actually hit if you want to achieve product, the kind of product market fit that's going to allow you to get really get this product out there into the world. And so it's pretty well-known process of rapid iteration towards something that really achieves product market fit and can take off. Yeah, but presumably here you're talking about the costs for the doer at scale, and that seems like a slightly different proposition, because you have to know what their costs are, how they're approaching it, how good the accuracy of the figures they have, all kinds of things like that. I don't know, I'm just thinking about that again. Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is it's different for everything we do. So again, when you. Here's a really simple thing. I look at somebody as a primary healthcare idea, and the first question is, well, what is the country's healthcare budget per capita? And if it's $30 in your program and you understand that probably only a portion of that is going to go to primary healthcare, let's say very optimistically half of it. Well, then that's the price point per capita that you need to hit, and you need to design something toward that price point. And so you. That's a very simple example, but in truth, for example, even within that, maybe you try to figure. You actually do some bench research to try to figure out what part of that government's health budget actually does go to primary healthcare, and you start to create the relationships within the government that allow you to start negotiating that. And maybe you can over time help drive and increase in that expenditure. Maybe you can help the government find more resources that allow them to pay more. But it's an ongoing process of actively trying to learn and actively trying to figure out what is that number that, A, it's really going to cost the government and B, the government's actually willing to pay, and how do we finally, in the end, hit that? That's very helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Now, on a journey to scale organizations can be at different stages on the journey. How do you think about this? I think you, when we talk for you, you talk about the idea of placing the dot, but there's the R&D, I guess, a lab phase, maybe a replication phase. Can you just give an overview of that? And how that changes things, I suppose, at each of the different stages, maybe your emphasis is different when looking at this question of scale, maybe not, but just that framework and placing the dot will be helping together. Well, we think of things as going through three stages, going from that idea toward that dream, and the first is R&D, where you're trying to come up with a systematic, replicable model. And you're doing your first approximation of whether it's good enough, and you're trying to get persuasive evidence, persuasive early evidence, that in fact, it's good enough to keep going. And you're trying to test some of your early assumptions of big enough to reassure yourself that, in fact, it's big enough to keep going. And the same with simple enough and cheap enough, you're doing that early work to understand what your idea would cost, and given your initial conception of what it is, and you're trying to investigate what your pair would pay, and you're able to make a persuasive case that says, we should keep going. And then in the growth phase, you're really trying to then increase your own replications to achieve economies of scale to understand what this thing really costs, to start to get the more rigorous evidence over time that tells you if this thing is really worth scaling. And to start in, and to do enough replications yourself to start getting a sense of what simple enough might mean, and refine it toward that end, and in fact start engaging, say, governments or other NGOs, depending on the path you've chosen, and then get to the point with all of the enoughs where you actually feel that you have rigorous evidence and are ready to scale. And of course, this is never perfectly uniform and ideal, but that's the idea of what that growth phase, you're just getting big enough to be able to make a rigorous case for the enoughs. A rigorous case enough that you are confident you have something scalable, and you're ready to make it happen. And then when we think about what really creates that exponential acceleration of impact, it has sort of six factors, six elements of what we call that big shift into that sustained acceleration of impact. And the first is that you actually, over time, honed your model to make it better, bigger, simpler, cheaper. The second is that you've engaged and started to recruit and enable the duar at scale others to replicate your idea, that you've then transferred from your initial pair, which is typically philanthropy, into your pair at scale, which is often big aid and/or taxes. And that you are making optimal use of emerging technologies to extend your reach and lower your transaction costs and amplify your impact. And also policy, you've identified, you've come to understand the policies that need to be changed in order to lower barriers and open doors. And finally, you look for systematic ways to achieve collective action by finding out the allies you might have and banding together for more impact or finding a movement you can be part of, or even like in the case of professionalized community health workers, helping to start a movement to create a much broader change than you could do by yourself. So these six things are what we think of as driving that big shift from linear growth to exponential growth over time. And how you do that big shift allows you then to start to decouple money and impact. In other words, in growth phase, more impact just takes more money. And if organizations don't start to achieve that big shift, they can never decouple that linear relationship of money and impact. And they will always be on more of a linear course or at best, a burst of acceleration that then turns that flattens out in plateaus. You talked there about, I guess, the importance of collective action networks, you might say, are working in collaboration and so forth. Can you offer some advice in terms of partnerships, forming partnerships identifying partners. We talked about the distinction between DuraScan and PeriScan, but just generally any advice from your experience about how to approach the whole thinking and execution of partnerships Kevin. Yeah, we have a very simple tool we call should do, could do, would do. And when thinking about a partner, whether it's a new country to go to or an NGO to work with, or some other kind of important role you need to know how to play, as you think about it, you think about the larger pool of well, who should do this? In other words, who, given their mission and their mandate, and their obligations really should do this idea, really should work with us. Okay. And of that pool, who could do it? In other words, who is competent enough, who has the potential resources, that if they wanted to do it, they could do it. And of those, who is the smaller pool who would do it? In other words, who are willing to make the commitment of policy, the commitment of resources, the commitment toward quality to get it right? And we say only work with the wood do's, because they are actually headed in the same direction you are there. They are the ones most likely to successfully implement your idea and get the same kind of impact you did. Yeah, that's very interesting. There can be some challenges as well if you're a small organization and you're dealing with a large organization, maybe it's a corporation, some cases who've got, you know, or just generally a large organization that could be quite challenging to manage that relationship, I suppose. Yeah, that's why selecting, kind of doing that exercise before you even start is so critical. You can't, you can't change the behavior of others. You can only, well, obviously, really work toward behavior change, but when you're talking about a potential partner, it's important that they're already aligned with you because you can't achieve that alignment subsequent to your investment in them. You have to be headed the same way. Yeah, fascinating, fascinating. Anything you want to add, we've covered a lot of ground there and I clearly could dig in more and indeed there are other useful frameworks that you have that are very valuable. Anything you'd like to add? Well, I'll just close with the, right now, I think my biggest overarching goal is to do whatever we can to make funders accountable for impact. In other words, you know, with most organizations, you have, well, in the business world, you have customers give feedback to organizations and companies and firms are actually accountable to the customers. If they don't serve the customers, they don't provide value to the customers. The customers don't buy their products and eventually they go out of business. If they go out of business, then their investors suffer. So we have a direct feedback loop from direct accountability all the way from the customers to the investor. In the not-for-profit world, the organizations are truly only accountable to the funders. And often those people that they are actually have set out to and are obligated to serve have no real way to signal whether they got value out of the work of the organization. And so the funders have to hold the organizations accountable for impact and hence hold themselves accountable for impact. And if we started to do that pervasively over the whole sector, we would start to see the kind of market dynamics where organizations that didn't provide impact, didn't provide value to those they set out to serve would either have to get better or they'd go out of business and the organizations that were really good at it would attract resources from funders who are looking and making themselves responsible for impact. And I think that's the single biggest thing that's going to transform the sector and give us hope for the kind of change we all want to see in the world. How do we do that? How is that done? How do you hold these organizations to account? Well, I've talked about how we hold them to account by joining them in common cause to measure their impact by understanding their mission, getting the right metrics, showing that they've achieved a change and actually demonstrating how much of that was due to their efforts. And if that becomes the norm, if funders really start to expect that from organizations, organizations will do a better and better job of it. And it really comes from the funders and we've managed to make things like, you know, there's been some admirable reforms where we've made things like more localization of decisions and leadership, something that funders took up and became a reputational risk for them if they didn't achieve it or diversity or decolonization. All these things that were positive changes in the sector, we managed to make -- we managed to attach them to reputational risk and we managed to make them signals of virtue. And we need to do the same for impact. And we should have done a long time ago and I'm kind of surprised that we haven't managed to, but I believe very deeply that we somehow will. >> That's a very worthwhile, an important project, Kevin. And thank you so much for your time today and sharing your deep work you're doing and thinking around scaling, impact, scaling, impact that organizations, just so important and I wish you all the best, Kevin, with your ongoing work. >> Thank you, Fergal. It was a pleasure. >> Thank you for listening to the Inspiring Social Entrepreneur podcast. I hope you found this interview inspiring. Please make sure to visit www.inspiringsocialonchpreneur.com and subscribe to make sure you don't miss any future podcasts.