Our short-term goal is that our social ventures develop effective solutions for children and youth and become ready to scale. More specifically our goal is that, by the end of their third year in the incubator, our social ventures:

A Have implemented effective solutions for children and youth

B Are ready to financially sustain their operations at scale

C Have strong leadership and a team ready for scale

D Have initiated impact scaling

E Have begun carrying out systems change activities (if applicable)

We track our social ventures’ development towards the targeted outcomes through, before and after assessment, i.e. at the start and end of each incubator year. The indicator we use for tracking our social ventures' development is Number of milestones reached. A milestone is either a completed activity (e.g. Theory of Change mapped) or a result accomplished (e.g. Positive outcome results achieved) on the path towards the targeted outcome.

Milestones are predefined by Reach for Change and are the same for all social ventures participating in the incubator. Together they make up our core monitoring tool, the Development Tracker. In the spider chart below, milestones are symbolized by the small yellow and pink circles fanning out from the center of the chart. Milestone achievement is assessed in dialogue between our in-country program manager and the social entrepreneur.

Results

100% of our social ventures developed within at least one of the five areas during 2018, and as many as 69% developed within four or five areas. They were able to check off an average of 17 new milestones and achieved an average of 75% of the targeted milestones across all areas. We observe the highest average target achievement within area C Leadership and Team (82%) and the lowest within area D Impact Scaling (50%).

In an attempt to capture how much of this development would not have happened without our support — our impact — we surveyed our social entrepreneurs anonymously at the end of 2018.

93% of our social entrepreneurs believe that they would have advanced less without support from Reach for Change, and 44% believe that they would have advanced significantly or far less or stopped operating or never started operating. Our contribution to our social ventures’ development was reported as the largest within the areas A Effective solution and B Financial sustainability; over two thirds felt that our contribution was significant, large or crucial.

These were our priority support areas in 2018, and we are pleased with this result. We gave our social ventures the least support within the area D Systems change, which is also reflected in the numbers. We are happy that almost all our social ventures report that Reach for Change also had an impact on their ability to make a positive difference for children and youth — our end beneficiaries. 99% said that we helped them address children's needs more effectively and 95% said that we helped them increase the number of children and youth they reached.

LONG-TERM OUTCOMES

Our targeted long-term outcome is that our alumni (the social ventures that have graduated from the incubator) scale their impact to a significant share of their target group and contribute to fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals for children and youth. Based on the results of our most recent alumni survey, we see that 9 in 10 continue to operate.

This is slightly higher than the median survival rate of incubated organizations (85%) and considerably higher than the survival rate of non-incubated organizations (43%). 7 in 10 of our alumni demonstrate growth and in our next survey we aim to explore in more detail to what extent they have scaled their impact and reached a significant share of their target group.