In a challenging funding landscape for charities, can any organisations hope to grow? 

At a time of pressure on the third sector and charities shrinking and closing across the country, you might not expect to see a charity like Cerebra striving to double its impact. 

Cerebra is a UK charity supporting children with neurological conditions – from autism to cerebral palsy – and their families and carers.

Meeting unmet need

As a new leadership team at the charity, we recognised the potential to go further in meeting huge unmet need. There are over 500,000 children with neurological conditions in the UK and the vast majority do not access our support – and potential of Cerebra’s services.

For neurodiverse children sleep is often a major problem and the impact on the child and the entire family can be unrelentingly shattering. Our specialised sleep advice helps over 600 families a year crack disrupted nights. 

Children with neurological conditions are also very often excluded from play and enjoyment of sports and outdoor facilities. Our product design and innovation engineers supply bespoke equipment to over 150 children a year, helping them take part and find joy in sports and other activities.

We know that we can’t simply push our existing fundraising channels and service delivery: we needed to think differently about how we achieve impact and generate income. 

So, we put out a brief for support and chose to partner with The Social Innovation Consultancy. Bringing in an external partner was new to us, but it quickly became clear that having a critical friend in the form of a specialist consultancy was fundamental to making real progress, rather than just creating another strategy document for the shelf. 

Here’s what we learned about building a scaling strategy that sticks — and the tools that made it work:

1. Use your values as a compass and understand the landscape you are scaling in(to) 

A scaling strategy helps turn vision into action by addressing key questions:

• What does scaling look like in our specific context and for the impact we want to achieve? What matters most to us – finding ways to reach more people, expanding the impact we have for each person, or targeting our support for people with certain needs?
• How can we extend reach without eroding our values and the quality of our services? For example, with Cerebra’s services being based on a fundamental principle of staying free for families, are any user charging models acceptable or are there alternative income models that could allow us to help more people?
• Which pathways are available and viable for us? For example, should we scale through traditional, organisational growth or are there ways of increasing our impact indirectly, for example through partnerships with government or other organisations? 

For Cerebra, those questions were vital. We needed a plan not just to grow, but to position our sleep service and innovation and product design service within changing policies and funding structures for disabled children as well as a range of evolving socio-economic pressures on families.

At the same time, charities at large are facing tough headwinds: static grants, higher demand, and growing complexity in public commissioning. A smart scaling strategy positions an organisation to thrive because of these challenges, not despite them.

To help us build an evidence-based strategy, we integrated an extensive market mapping, systems analysis, and horizon scanning to understand how these pressures shape opportunities. We interviewed a range of peers, partners, and potential funders – such as NHS commissioners – to understand where the ‘market-place’ for similar services was more or less crowded, where funding was clustered, and what the priorities were of different types of funders. 

This research helped Cerebra gather intelligence about which scaling pathways may carry more or less friction and risk. For example, some Cerebra services are already well aligned with the priorities of funders, while for other services we would have to first raise awareness of need and convince funders to prioritise budgets to address these. 

One of the biggest learnings for Cerebra’s leadership team was that we had to be willing to surface and really look at risk, rather than treating it as something to minimise at all costs. Understanding the explicit risk profile of different routes – and being honest about where we were asking our teams to stretch – helped us make bolder choices while still bringing trustees and colleagues along with us. 

This helped us to choose a ‘package’ of scaling pathways that collectively are realistic and achievable within a 2-5 year timeframe.

2. The teams are your best resource for ideas – make sure you listen

Cerebra’s teams are experts in their fields and spend every day thinking about how to best help children with neurological conditions. Our service teams are likely to have better ideas than anyone from the outside looking in – and they are the people that will be delivering the scale-up plans. 

To ensure that we took this resource seriously and had the teams’ buy-in for the final plans, we took an iterative co-design approach to every stage of the strategy development. Instead of presenting a strategy to the team, we built it with them. The tools we used included:

• An iterative cycle of several semi-structured interviews and workshops to capture service pain points, strengths, opportunities and ideas, feeding these into subsequent scaling prototype pathways and getting feedback at each stage. 
• Foresight research and discussions mapping the team’s sense of emerging trends, risks, and opportunities for Cerebra and its services. There are plenty of great, free resources on foresight, but we like this one from Save the Children and School of International Futures because it is simple and practical. Understanding the potential future scenarios helped us to stress test the different scaling pathways and consider longer-term (5-10 year+) options for growing impact.

The service teams had already considered a range of options for scaling and many of their ideas fed directly into what became the final scaling package.

However, the process required a different kind of trust. We needed to deeply trust our staff not only to come up with ideas, but to trust the process itself – even when it felt new and unusual, slow, messy, or when their preferred option didn’t make it through to the final package. 

Keeping colleagues and our trustees regularly looped in meant that nobody felt the strategy was being done “to” them. Instead, they could see their fingerprints on the final plan.

We also learned that we could do much more of this work online than many expected. Structured digital workshops, online whiteboards, and short, focused virtual sessions made it easier to involve people from different locations and roles, without taking them out of vital service delivery for long stretches. 

For a charity with staff based across the UK, that flexibility was a game changer, but it was imperative that we were working with a partner who were experts in using these tools and coaching the use of them by Cerebra colleagues.

3. Create a range of realistic growth pathways, test them – and don’t be afraid to change your mind

With a detailed understanding of the landscape; trends; and strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for each of the services in place, we developed a set of scaling ‘prototypes’ – rough sketches of different ideas for generating income and impact. 

We did this through a phased approach of initial, broad ideation and subsequent appraisal and convergence on the best ideas:

• To ensure that we fully explored all options, we ran an interactive workshop on ‘endgame’ modelling, using this SSIR framework to explore different ‘archetypes’ of scaling, or ‘the specific role a charity intends to play in the overall solution to a social problem once it has proven the effectiveness of its core model or intervention.’

The six overall endgame categories (Open Source, Replication, Government Adoption, Commercial Adoption, Mission Achievement, and Sustained Service) helped us explore almost 30 different ways Cerebra could scale its impact, either through growing and diversifying the charity’s own income and partnerships or through others delivering its services at scale. 

For example, what might Cerebra’s sleep advice service look like if delivered by the government? What could the innovation and product design service achieve if it took an open source approach? This allowed us to broaden our view of what scaling could look like beyond just traditional, incremental organisational growth. 

• At the next stage, the Cerebra leadership team then rated the impact potential and feasibility of each idea, allowing us to assess all possible pathways before converging on those that offered the best fit for the organisation and specific services. 

We used an adapted version of the ‘Five Rs’ framework, asking a selected group of Cerebra staff to assess how easy, costly, and impactful each of the potential scaling models would be. 

This allowed the Cerebra leadership to rule out a large number of pathways for which the expected return (impact) did not match up to the anticipated effort and risk of the model.

• Having narrowed the field to the nine most promising ideas, we then held a rapid prototyping session with colleagues, where we built and iterated business model canvases for each potential pathway. 

The Social Innovation Consultancy used canvases adapted specifically to social impact and to Cerebra’s design brief for its scaling strategy. 

This let us discuss the practical details of each idea: for example, how much revenue could we expect to generate in each scenario? How well would each idea align with the organisation’s current operating model, and how much resource would it take to pursue each of the pathways?

• Based on this, Cerebra’s leadership team chose a final ‘scaling package’ of three pathways. 

This portfolio approach will help to spread the risk: each of the pathways have varying levels of novelty and risk attached–while some will, with fairly high certainty, bring a gradual growth in income, others are more uncertain but could bring rapid, exponential growth in both impact and income. 

• Finally, we carried out a more detailed risk and feasibility assessment and held a series of structured feedback rounds – with the leadership team, service teams, Board committees, and critical friends. 

This resulted in a nuanced interrogation of the scaling options and, as a result, Cerebra made several significant adjustments to its final plans.

From the inside, this process often felt like we were “slaughtering donkeys” – letting go of ideas that were loved, familiar, or had real potential, but which simply didn’t stack up when we looked hard at feasibility, risk, or alignment with our mission. 

Having a neutral facilitator was key here: someone who could ask tough questions, push us to pivot when needed, and hold the mirror up to our assumptions meant we didn’t cling on to plans that would have drained time and energy without delivering the impact we wanted.

The results

Cerebra is at the beginning of our scale-up journey, and we are committed to finding ways to reach all the children who need us. 

Taking this ambition seriously for us as a leadership team meant using a structured process of exploring all roads open to us, listening to our colleagues in the service teams, and being unafraid to let our own ideas go. 

This structured decision-making process demystified scaling. It clarified which ideas to pursue, which needed iteration, and which to park. 

The result was a clear, costed, and implementable growth plan grounded in evidence – and most importantly, we have an engaged team ready and excited to deliver it: Cerebra’s people are key to testing the plans in practice and feeding back on what works, and we have to be prepared to adapt and pivot our plans as we begin to see evidence on how each of our scaling pathways deliver in practice.

If we can keep doing that, we are confident that we can continue growing our impact in a way that is sustainable, values-led, and genuinely transformative for the families we serve.

Want to be part of making Cerebra’s new scaling strategy a success? Take a look at jobs we’re currently recruiting for!

The Social Innovation Consultancy’s approach blends strategy design, foresight, and inclusive facilitation to help social purpose organisations design for impact. If your organisation is exploring growth — whether through partnerships, replication, or systems change — do reach out. We love to share what we’ve learned!