Charities must grow if they do not want to see good ideas wasted, but often lack the will, the knowledge and the funding to do so, according to a report published today by think tank NPC.

The report, Growing Pains: Getting Past the Complexities of Scaling Social Impact, aims to provide a guide for charities to help them assess when and how to grow.

It says that organisations with good ideas need to scale up because it is rare for those ideas to pass organically from other organisations or area to another, and that as a result, the charity sector wastes time “reinventing the wheel”. But it says there is a “general lack of will” to achieve this.

“A number of systemic and attitudinal barriers to scaling still exist,” the report says. “The nature of the voluntary sector as a system presents considerable challenges, owing to the complexity of social problems, the difficulty of establishing accurate measures of progress, and the absence of investor incentives.

“At the same time, there is a general lack of will to seriously pursue scale. Funders rarely fund in a way that supports attempts to scale, while charities are often of the opinion that ‘small is beautiful’.”

The report says solutions for social problems are also slow to move from one charity to another.

“Clearly charities have a tendency to remain physically and financially small,” the report says. “Though organisational growth is certainly not the only route to scale, there is little indication that effective approaches diffuse from organisation to organisation either. Instead, ideas grow up individually and independently, with different organisations protecting their own ways of doing things, and the most effective approaches taking root in isolated pockets.”

The report says that charities must try to reach “a greater proportion of those in need”, and that the purpose of scaling up must be to do this. It says that scaling up does not necessarily involve the organisation itself becoming larger, if it can be done by replicating its activities elsewhere, or by informally spreading its ideas as best practice.

It says that scaling up a good idea can often cause difficulties.

“The act of extending reach can introduce any number of complications,” the report says, “from losing touch with local communities and the expertise this relationship brings, to an inability to replicate the impact of dedicated staff teams and inspirational leaders who believe in the cause. Successful scaling must therefore extend reach without significantly reducing impact.”