Your impact strategy and how it helps measure what matters.
Social impact measurement is the process of understanding how much social change occurred and can be attributed to an organisation’s activities.
It is not data collection for data collection’s sake. Every number is a person, every case study represents someone’s life. The integrity of this process is strengthened by an impact statement and a clear impact-driven, stakeholder focused strategy.
You will define your Impact Strategy using Theory of Change
1. Start with a mission-focused theory of change.
Theory of change is the foundation to demonstrate the evidence of the change - create the impact statement describing the problem you are trying to solve.
Outline a program logic model that shows a clear connection between your intervention and your desired outcome.
2. Design the impact metrics – demonstrated the effective change you desire + demonstrate to funders. We need to move away with the preoccupation with metrics that demonstrate how busy staff members are (the number of activities conducted, the number of people reached, and so on), and explore more relevant metrics that indicate whether programs are actually improving people’s lives.
Do not start from scratch
Use existing standards - UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are becoming the most used common language around defining areas of intended impact
or custom/bespoke standards – eg. If you are measuring ‘Quality employment’ – what are the standards to define ‘quality job’
Think of who the audience is – internal quality improvement, funders (government, impact investors)
Measure outcomes not just outputs
Collect impact metrics that you can collect successfully (ie. staff, systems etc)
3. Use quantitative & qualitative metrics that are measurable and definitive - look at how they interact.
4. Create a data dictionary, with clear definitions for each indicator, to ensure its context is understood
5. Aligning with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – funders and investors are increasingly aligning with these goals
6. Align your data sources – with your metrics.
To achieve this and to take a system view, we first must define ourselves – our organisations, our missions, our strategies, our activities – in terms of social outcomes. We then need to establish shared principles of measurement and to be courageous in our reporting and evaluating of where we are succeeding and where we are not. And act as a result.
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