The Orchestrator: helping local systems take control of long-term change

For 20 years at Social Finance we have worked on the question of how to make social change happen. For 20 years, we’ve talked about impact investing and about public services moving from expensive crisis response to earlier, relational support. We’ve got lots of evidence that earlier support works and saves money, but the system hasn’t changed.

One reason is financial. Pilots are frequently funded through short-term innovation budgets. The work on budget integration and the choices that need to be made for them to become part of business as usual happen too late or not at all. Any savings may also be hard to see: reduced demand from one population group can create capacity for other people so your costs don’t go down; or you may have slowed growth in demand, but that growth has not been factored into planning, so the success of a pilot doesn’t get recognised.

Change also requires a complex mix of skills – from analytics, service design and community engagement to outcome measurement, investment and quality improvement. Leaders get conflicting advice from organisations that see the world through their specific expertise, which can make it hard to know where to start. 

The result is a familiar pattern: ambitious transformation plans that are difficult to sustain. 

We believe a better route is to begin with achievable priorities, recycle the value they create and build towards wider transformation over time. We start by understanding the system’s assets and weaknesses, developing priorities according to circumstances and working with internal capacity, only bringing in additional expertise if required. 

The Orchestrator is designed to support local systems over a ten-year horizon: rebalancing finance and public services towards prevention so that more people achieve better outcomes at a lower overall cost. The aim is to help places make that shift using their existing resources, without waiting for a new central government initiative.

We start with one or two exploratory workshops, looking at how people and money move through the system and what the blockages to change are in their environment. This shapes a focused 12- to 16-week diagnostic process. By the end, partners have a clear first set of priorities, an understanding of their financial value and human impact, and a practical route to implementation.

The diagnostic is not an off-the-shelf toolkit. It draws on playbooks and previous models developed by Social Finance, covering recycling finances, the local environment for change, service design, finance, data and measurement, the supply market and your relationship to it, leadership and workforce capacity. It can also include detailed analysis to understand where people’s journeys through services could have led to better outcomes. 

We work as trusted change architects and honest brokers: diagnosing what the system needs, helping local partners decide what they can do themselves, and identifying where support should come from us or others.

That means being guided by the change a place needs, not by the services we want to sell. It also means confronting difficult choices and being precise about where savings will arise: whether that’s from reducing high-cost provision, easing pressure on staff and services, or slowing growth in demand enough to make the system sustainable.

Ultimately, the Orchestrator is about agency. We want local organisations to feel more hopeful about change because they have the insight, mechanisms and resources to sustain it themselves – continually improving services and shifting towards a more preventative, supportive system.