Growing with Purpose

This webinar explores how social enterprises can scale their impact while staying true to their purpose, drawing on the experience of Umbo, a social enterprise delivering allied health services to regional, rural and remote communities across Australia.

The discussion explores key lessons from Umbo’s growth journey, including:

• Identifying and responding to a significant unmet need in underserved communities.
• Embedding mission and purpose into governance, ownership structures and organisational culture from the outset.
• Using innovation and technology to improve access to services and address systemic barriers.
• Balancing social impact and financial sustainability while maintaining a clear mission.
• Measuring outcomes, not just outputs, to understand and demonstrate impact.
• Building values-aligned teams and maintaining a strong organisational culture through periods of growth.
• Navigating the transition from start-up to a more structured and strategic organisation.
• Establishing governance, systems and processes that support sustainable growth.
• Making deliberate decisions about funding, partnerships and service delivery to avoid mission drift.
• Creating organisational guardrails that protect purpose when growth opportunities arise.
• Learning from challenges, setbacks and difficult decisions, including managing expansion and scaling responsibly.
• Exploring how data and impact measurement can be used to strengthen advocacy and drive systems change.

Throughout the conversation, speakers reflect on the tension between mission and money, emphasising the importance of using purpose as a guiding "North Star" for decision-making. Participants gain practical insights into scaling a social enterprise, maintaining mission integrity and creating long-term impact in communities that are often overlooked by mainstream service systems.

Show notes and quotes

Francesca Pinzone: “But really, the North Star in 2030 will still be the same for Umbo in supporting underserved and regional communities across Australia. That’s the key for us. That piece won't change. That's what's really important.”

“I love that you love the tension, because I think that brings really robust conversations, and that's what we should be having, really robust conversations.”

“Saying no to misaligned partnerships - making sure that if we have to, we can walk away from partnerships that don't align with us, because we don't want to compromise just to grow. Mission integrity feels non-negotiable to us.”

Jeannie McDonald: “One of the key things we prioritise at Umbo, because it aligns with our mission, is that measuring outcomes is more important than measuring outputs.”

“We've talked a little bit about growth and how we went through quite a rapid growth period. That was a priority for us because we saw it as meeting our mission - it would expand our ability to reach the people we wanted to provide services to.”

“...we're now at a point where we really need to step back and think about whether we're asking the right questions about the way we measure our impact. We do want to get a really good sense of our broader impact as well as our individual impact, and to understand the volume and depth of impact.”

Samantha McDonnell: Everything starts off, it's fantastic, you're all keen, and at some point, it becomes really tough. The depth of how tough it's going to be depends on what's happening for you, but sometimes it can be really tough, and it can be tough for quite a while. I think the transition to becoming a strategic business is about how you deal with those tough times. 

“It definitely requires that experimental culture, because to find what works, you've got to be prepared to take a risk and have lots of different ideas about how to get to where you need to be…I do think it's important to recognise that when you're experimenting, you're not necessarily looking at long-term success, but you do need to get there eventually if you're looking to be an organisation that continues to have impact.”

“I think the tension creates better outcomes. If nobody's asking or challenging in the process, then you haven't considered everything.”

Explore more

For those who are keen to dive deeper and do differently, here are some links to learnings and resources mentioned by the speakers and/or related to the open learning topic:

• Presentation slides
• Australian Therapy Outcomes Measures (AusTOMS)
• Modified Monash Model (MMM)
• Earning the Right to Scale
• How I Built This - Podcast with Guy Raz
• Médecins Sans Frontières 
• UNICEF