Scaling Social Mission Organizations: A Field Guide

Molly Elgin-Cossart

Foreword by Kumar Garg, President

One of the areas I find where both scientists and technologists struggle most is how to build organizations that meet their goals for public impact. This is especially true when they don't fall under the usual business models of either a traditional research lab (mostly public research funding), or startup (financing from VC and related sources). Whether structured as a company or a non-profit, building these social mission organizations requires a focus on a wider source of financing and talent than what most researchers are used to.

Today's guest post comes from someone who has navigated these complexities firsthand - Molly Elgin-Cossart. As a strategic operator who has scaled mission-driven organisations from founding through 150+ employees, Molly brings hard-won insights about the unique tensions that define discovery-to-impact work: maintaining technical integrity while building commercial sustainability, managing interdisciplinary teams united by purpose but challenged by impossible expectations, and creating institutional resilience in the face of funding volatility.

For the scientists and technologists in our community grappling with building a scalable product or service, this framework offers practical guidance on aligning mission with revenue without compromising core values. For the philanthropists making strategic bets on such organisations, it provides essential insight into the operational realities that determine whether breakthrough research translates into scalable solutions.

The challenges she describes, from finding your organisational North Star to building teams that can handle the emotional weight of tackling systemic problems, will resonate with anyone working at the intersection of scientific discovery and social impact. Her experience demonstrates that the false choice between mission and sustainability is exactly that: false. The organisations that achieve lasting impact are those that build systems - both on financing and talent - where these elements reinforce rather than undermine each other.

What follows is a field guide for turning insights from the research community into institutions that can operate at the scale of the problems they're designed to solve.

Introduction

If you care about social impact, you need to also care about scale. Not because scale is an end in itself, but because it's one way to ensure that the social benefit you're working on reaches more people.

Scaling a mission-driven organization, however, is uniquely challenging. You're carrying the weight of problems that feel impossible to solve, making decisions that affect vulnerable communities, and often doing so with limited resources. Before diving into strategies, let's acknowledge something rarely discussed in scaling guides: being a breakthrough-to-impact founder is uniquely isolating.

This field guide is specifically designed for strategic operators in breakthrough-to-impact organizations scaling from founding through about 150 employees, whether you're translating scientific discoveries, technological innovations, or social solutions into scalable change. While others have contributed insights on funding challenges, my focus is on the operational and cultural strategies that help mission-driven leaders build sustainable organizations.

Through my experiences at Propel (a VC-backed technology company serving government benefits recipients) and Merit America (a large-scale nonprofit focused on education and economic mobility), I've identified effective playbooks that enable scale for mission-driven organizations. The strategies that follow are designed to help you navigate the unique tensions between growth and mission integrity that define this work.

1. Find Your North Star

At both Propel and Merit America, we had clear, measurable North Stars that transformed how we operated.

At Propel, it was "Dollars in Pockets", a direct measure of the economic impact we were creating for low-income Americans. At Merit America, it was "Billion Dollars in Wage Gains", quantifying the earnings boost our career programs created. North Stars provide three critical pieces to early stage organizations:

• Clarity. When you're deciding between different features, programs, or partnerships, the question becomes simple: "Which will drive more wage gains for our learners?" A clear, measurable North Star helps you focus and drive decisions.

• Focus. Your North Star is a clear message about what you are and aren't doing. You're not tackling all injustice everywhere, but you are tackling a specific, concrete issue. This helps you drive strategy and be more effective.

• Alignment. Shared language empowers individuals to make decisions that ladder up to the organizational goal. This makes the organization more effective and is essential for scaling. You can't micromanage every decision as you grow.
  Your North Star should be more specific than your mission and more meaningful than your KPIs. It should directly reflect the change you're trying to create in the world.

Don't overthink it. Pick something simple, measurable, and directly connected to your impact. You can refine it over time, but having a clear North Star from the beginning will save you endless strategy debates and keep you honest about whether you're making progress.

If you asked three random team members today what success looks like, would they give the same answer? What would need to change to get everyone aligned around a clear North Star?

Your North Star provides the foundation for every other scaling decision, including the hardest one: how to fund your growth sustainably.

2. Build Revenue That Serves Your Mission

Too often, mission-driven leaders are either skeptical of revenue, thinking it will compromise their mission, or they are uncomfortable thinking about revenue models and leave it until too late.

Mission comes first, but to have lasting impact, you need sustainability. Too many organizations fail to establish sustainable streams, which hinders their work or leads to dissolution.

Revenue can't be an afterthought; it's an architectural decision, not an add-on. You wouldn't build a house without integrating the electrical system from the beginning. Don't build an impact organization without integrating the revenue that makes it run from the get-go.

Mission and revenue can, and should, reinforce each other. When done well, revenue is an essential piece of achieving your vision. If your revenue model pulls against your mission, one will eventually win. So the key is finding a revenue model aligned with your mission.
Start by identifying the value you create. To whom is that value worth enough that they might be willing to pay? At Propel, we partnered with commercial entities who had compelling business reasons to engage with SNAP recipients but needed a respectful, trusted environment and advice on how to engage effectively. At Merit America, we experimented with both employer-led and student-led revenue models, but found that student-led was ultimately more successful.

Next, set guardrails to ensure mission and revenue stay aligned. For example, if you're a scientific research organization, you might want to maintain focus on socially beneficial applications or ensure open publication of findings. What are your core non-negotiables? Write them down and commit upfront to maintaining them. Work from first principles; at Propel, we operated from written, publicly shared principles. For example: Did the ad provide goods or services that immediately delivered tangible value to people using our platform?

Rather than constraints, guardrails create competitive differentiation and premium positioning. At Propel, because we had a highly specific audience that directly benefited from what partners offered, and we maintained high user trust through selectivity, we commanded premium prices from commercial partners for our unique market value.

Focus on one primary revenue stream. While you'll likely experiment with different models early on, research from Bridgespan's 2024 "Funding Strategies of Large US Nonprofits" shows that over 90 percent of nonprofits with $50M+ in annual revenue raise the bulk of their money from a single funding category.

Once you've identified a viable main revenue line, build your team to excel at that model. If you're pursuing government funding, hire people who understand procurement and compliance. If you're building earned revenue, invest in product and user experience talent. You want your team's capabilities aligned with your revenue model just as much as you want your revenue model aligned with your mission.

To avoid over-dependence, diversify within your main revenue line (e.g., partner with many paying clients, or get grants from different governments and levels of government.) But don't diversify so much that you lose focus.

Which of your current revenue streams feels most sustainable and mission-aligned? What would it take to grow that stream or develop similar ones?

Even the most mission-aligned revenue model means nothing without the operational discipline to manage it well.

3. Own Your Financial Health

Most mission-driven organizations struggle with finances not because they don't care, but because they don't have the right systems and leadership in place.

Common financial pitfalls include:

• Checking boxes (budgets and reports) without true operational discipline

• Relying on founder vigilance rather than proper financial systems

• Underinvesting in financial expertise until a crisis emerges

• Treating fundraising success as financial health

• Focusing on audit compliance rather than strategic financial planning

From day one, someone inside your organization needs to genuinely own financial health and drive hard decisions. What matters isn't the title, but that this person has clear decision-making authority, sufficient financial acumen to understand implications of choices, the ability to articulate tradeoffs to leadership, and willingness to have tough conversations about resource allocation.

Your finance function needs to deliver five critical elements:

• Cash flow visibility. Maintain a rolling 18-month projection that you review monthly. Know your burn rate and runway at all times. Nonprofits face lumpy grants and donation cycles, while for-profit social ventures need independence to invest in their product and mission without being forced into unfavorable funding rounds or compromising decisions.

• Scenario planning. Develop clear "base case," "optimistic," and "conservative" scenarios. Budget according to your conservative scenario, but have plans ready for how you'll invest if the optimistic scenario materializes. This prevents the reactionary spending that often follows unexpected windfalls.

• Unit economics. Understand the cost to deliver each unit of your core impact - whether that's per beneficiary served, product delivered, or research breakthrough achieved - and how that changes at scale. This becomes your North Star for operational decisions.

• Financial dashboards. Create simple visualizations of key metrics that leadership reviews weekly. Include both backward-looking (actuals vs. budget) and forward-looking indicators.

• Regular financial reviews. Hold monthly financial discussions with your leadership team. Build financial literacy across your organization. Everyone should understand how you sustain your Mission.

Mission-driven organizations need a conservative approach to cash reserves. Nonprofits should aim for 18+ months of runway given long funding cycles. For-profit social ventures should target 15-18 months given the complexity of finding mission-aligned investors. This isn't excess "overhead", it's insurance that lets you make strategic decisions rather than desperate ones.

Do you have clear visibility into your 18-month financial outlook? What would need to change for you to feel confident with this level of runway?

Financial clarity creates the foundation for strategic focus. When you know your runway and unit economics, you can make informed tradeoffs about priorities. Without this foundation, everything feels equally urgent, and teams become scattered across too many initiatives.

4. Lightweight Goal Setting

Too many social mission organizations operate without clear goals, leaving teams adrift without direction. But don't overthink it, either. You don't need perfect goal-setting, you need functioning goal-setting.

Here's what works: At any given moment, everyone on your team should be able to name the 3 (not 5, not 10, but 3) things your organization needs to accomplish in the next six months to advance your North Star.

Work backwards from your North Star. What's the gap between where you are and where you want to be? What measurable milestones would represent meaningful progress?

Make goals ambitious but achievable. Review them monthly as a leadership team, and discuss progress in every all-hands meeting.

The format matters less than the focus. Whether you call them OKRs, priorities, or big rocks, what matters is that they create alignment and urgency around the right things.

If someone joined your team tomorrow, how quickly could they understand what success looks like this quarter? What would make your goals clearer and more actionable for your team?

Clear goals provide direction, but sustainable execution requires something deeper: a culture that can weather the unique emotional demands of social mission work while attracting and retaining the diverse talent needed to serve your mission effectively.

5. Build Resilient Team Culture That Can Handle the Weight

Social mission work carries an emotional load that conventional startups don't face. When you're tackling systemic inequity, discrimination, or poverty, every day can feel existential. Your team will burn out not just from long hours, but from the crushing weight of problems that feel impossible to solve.

Here's the challenge: your team's passion for justice will create impossible expectations. They'll want you to tackle every societal ill, make statements about every injustice, and respond to every crisis. If you try to meet these expectations, you'll burn out your organization and ultimately harm the mission you set out to accomplish.

• Make your North Star visible, but create manageable "whys." While your North Star provides ultimate direction, you need smaller, team-level purposes that feel accomplishable. In team meetings and goal-setting, tie daily work to these intermediate victories. It's less overwhelming to focus on "helping 100,000 families access discounted Internet" than constantly thinking about saving $1Bn over time.

• Create a values-aligned framework for organizational engagement. Your team will expect you to take stances on everything from racial violence to climate change to global conflicts. To make this manageable, develop transparent criteria for when and how your organization engages with external issues, and share it openly. Not taking action doesn't mean you don't care. It means you're staying focused on the change you're uniquely positioned to create.

• Help your team process the emotional weight of limitations. Acknowledge tradeoffs explicitly and normalize that focus requires saying no. When a product decision helps individuals without moving the systemic needle, that's okay. When you can't address every crisis your beneficiaries face, that's okay too. Help people understand that strategic focus is what allows you to build sustainable impact.

• Channel moral drive productively. High-achieving idealists often have very high bars and can become frustrated when the organization doesn't meet every expectation. Treat this as engagement, not opposition. Create culture surveys and feedback forums to hear all views, but set clear expectations about what input drives organizational action. Chasing every concern leads to exhaustion for everyone, leaders and team members alike.

I've seen organizations where leaders tried to respond to every team concern and moral imperative. The result wasn't a more engaged culture; it was continuous escalation of expectations until everyone was exhausted.

How do you help your team channel their passion for justice into your specific mission without burning out? What frameworks would help your team focus their moral drive more productively?

The organizations that sustain impact over decades are those that learn to hold the complexity of injustice while maintaining laser focus on their particular piece of the solution.

Final Thoughts

The world needs breakthrough-to-impact organizations that can operate at the scale of the problems they're solving. Building them requires rejecting false choices: between mission and revenue, between growth and integrity, between operational excellence and values.

I won't pretend this is easy or that any organization does it perfectly; I've learned as much from what hasn't worked as what has. But the organizations that make the biggest impact don't just survive these tensions, they build systems where these elements support rather than undermine each other.
You can build one of these organizations. Start with a clear North Star, build sustainable revenue that serves your mission, own your financial health, focus your goals, and invest in your people.

Scale isn't the goal. It's the mechanism that lets your solution match the size of your problem. The world needs solutions that match the scale of our challenges. Make yours one of them.

As we continue supporting discovery-to-impact organisations, this framework provides a roadmap for the institutional thinking required to match solutions to the size of today's challenges. The world's most pressing problems demand not just scientific breakthroughs, but organisations capable of translating those breakthroughs into lasting change.

The path from discovery to impact is complex, but it's navigable. What matters is building the operational foundation that allows breakthrough science to become breakthrough impact.

Have questions about scaling your discovery-to-impact organisation or interested in discussing how these frameworks apply to your work? We'd love to hear from you - get in touch at info@renphil.org to continue the conversation.