Transform your nonprofit from direct impact to systemic change

When you’re committed to fostering positive social change, it’s natural to strive for a broader reach of those who can benefit from your efforts. This necessitates moving beyond the idea that your organization must always be the direct agent of impact.

When I cofounded a nonprofit educational tech company, we started by directly helping students struggling with math—particularly algebra. Our idea was to provide tutoring to disadvantaged students during school hours, rather than outside of them. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we knew we had to adapt to reach more students.

Direct work with schools

Initially, we focused on serving middle and high school math students in Chicago and New York public schools. We recruited, trained, and employed tutors, developed a curriculum, and refined our methods for assisting students. Our program expanded to places like Stamford, Connecticut; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; Providence, Rhode Island; Broward County, Florida; and Charleston, South Carolina. With the University of Chicago Education Lab’s help, we amassed evidence through rigorous research that high-impact tutoring leads to significant educational progress.

In our second year, we broadened our reach by collaborating with a Netherlands-based organization. Sharing our tutoring model resulted in their successful implementation and reinforced our commitment in supporting others to succeed.

Expand from a direct to a widespread approach

When the global pandemic emerged, the demand for tutoring surged as millions of students fell behind. With guidance from Alex Cortez, then with New Profit and now with Bellwether Education Partners, we embraced a strategic framework for impact, ranging from direct impact to widespread impact to systems change.

When we considered the widespread approach, we decided that the most efficient way to extend the quality tutoring reach is for school systems to develop their own version of our model. By using our framework, software, tools, and resources, they can have their own significant influence. With our technical assistance partnership, they can achieve more than if we were merely their vendor.

Adopting a widespread approach accelerated our effect: Within the first two years of this strategy, we served an additional 30,000 students—it took us 10 years to help that many students with our direct services program.

Give away your knowledge

Part of a widespread strategy is sharing knowledge freely to address urgent needs. Offering complimentary products has increased our visibility and attracted a broader audience. We developed a no-cost, interactive training platform to assist new tutors in applying best practices. And we provide our tutoring curriculum to schools at no charge. By offering free resources, we encourage others to adopt practices that align with our mission and vision.

Offer premium help through consulting and capacity-building

With the expectation that districts would want customized guidance, we offered technical assistance to help partner districts to create and execute successful tutoring programs. Our support includes personalized program planning, tutor recruitment, training advice, and implementation help. With these premium services, schools are incorporating tutoring into their daily routines, budgets, and staffing strategies. Doing so has created a new earned revenue stream for our nonprofit that helps make our work more sustainable.

However, there are risks. When schools adapt our approach, their results may differ from what we would achieve if we ran the tutoring directly. To reach more students and achieve broader educational equity, we must accept this trade-off and support schools in quality implementation.

Changing minds, changing systems

In pursuit of widespread impact and systems change, organizations must develop new competencies, cultivate new partnerships, and identify new resources. If you are missing a capability, your organization must find ways to add it. When thinking about how tutoring could scale widely, we knew technology would play a pivotal role. That’s one reason we acquired Woot Math in 2020, a technology company that expanded our expertise.

We also ventured into the policy world, building relationships with the White House Domestic Policy Council, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Partnership for Student Success, and a bipartisan array of U.S. senators, representatives, and governors. This policy work was vital to building support for funding tutoring as part of federal and state post-COVID recovery efforts.

By embracing the framework of direct, widespread, and systems change, nonprofits can identify new areas to innovate and grow. The framework is not only a catalyst for innovation, but a practical approach for scaling evidence-based programs, opening the door to earned revenue opportunities for nonprofits. If you want to accelerate your organization’s growth, you must start thinking about building your partners’ capacity to take your approach and make it their own.

AJ Gutierrez is cofounder and chief policy and public affairs officer of Saga Education.