Appendix A
Research Methodology for the First Edition
We decided to write this book because we wanted to know how great nonprofits have achieved high levels of impact—how they scaled their social impact—in a relatively short period of time. We hoped to uncover useful lessons to share with organizations that aspired to similar results. In our research, we followed an inductive case-based methodology, also known in academia as “grounded theory.”1 This appendix includes more extensive detail about our methodology, building on the overview in Chapter One.
Our research followed four phases. In the first phase, we defined “high impact” in the context of the social sector, and established basic boundaries for our work. In the second phase, we devised ...
