Good impact measurement is key to the success of your organisation – it allows you to measure how effective you are, plan improvements and attract funders and supporters.
Jargon-buster
There’s a lot of jargon around this topic that can be hard to find your way through. Below is a jargon-buster to help you but please be careful – people use these words in lots of different ways so make sure you check how it’s being used in the document you are reading.
Monitoring/ Outputs
The numbers – how many people attended, how many sessions you ran in Easton, what postcodes people came from, what gender they identify as etc.
Evaluation
How your choices about your work affected its success – did we run our activities at the right time, in the right place? Did we use the right publicity methods?
User feedback
The overall experience of the people taking part – did they like the lunch, were the staff helpful?
Impact Measurement
Finding a way to measure and demonstrate the difference your work (intervention) has made to a person or community. This difference is about changes in behaviour and situation arising from increases in confidence, knowledge, influence etc
Impact measurement allows you to make it clear what people needed and how you met those needs.
Defining your impacts
To start, you need to have a clear idea of what your impacts are (or are likely to be if you are planning something new). Sometimes this can be hard, particularly if you are very involved in the activities whose impact you are trying to define.
It’s helpful to start off with the reasons why you do your work (the issues), then what you do to make your impact happen (the activities). That way you can see, and communicate to others, how the impact happens.
You want to end up with something clearly-defined and measurable. Below is an example of how not to do it!
“People in our area feel lonely so we run activities and clubs. Our club members feel less lonely now.”
You might want to write it this way instead.
“There are no accessible, low-cost clubs or activities for older people in our area although research shows that people feel lonely and isolated. We run a free weekly social club and monthly events in an accessible venue. Our members report feeling less lonely, making friends and gaining confidence.”
The description of an impact is called an indicator. You can have as many indicators as you like but sticking to a couple of the most important ones will be easier and more manageable.
Below are links to some indicators that you can use yourselves, or as examples to guide your thinking.
Measuring your impact
Once you have defined your impact you can start measuring it. There are lots of different ways to do this but it’s important to bear in mind;
- The methods you use need to be the right ones for your beneficiaries, things they will feel comfortable doing
- You need to have the capacity to do the work
- There’s no point in collecting a lot of useful impact data if you can’t store and retrieve it – in other words, if you can’t use it to tell you useful things about your impact.
You’ll also need to think about how often you do your measuring. If people are just coming to a single activity or event then you’ll need to do it then, but if you’ll be working with them for a while then you’ll have the opportunity to talk to them more often.
For a good summary of how to choose ways to measure impact click here.
Storing the impact information you collect
There are many different ways to store impact data:
You might use paper or digital ways to collect data on impact. If you can, it’s a good idea to transfer anything collected on paper into a digital system as this will make it easier to store and use.
You can store data on systems like MS Excel, MS Access, Google Sheets. If you are already using a customer relationship management / case management system (CRM) you can store your date on this.
If you’re interested in exploring the use of an electronic case management system, click here.
Make sure you store all the data that different people collect in the same place, in the same way.
Analysing your impact:
- Impact data can be analysed using applications like MS Excel, Power BI, Tableau, Google Analytics, Google Sheets.
- A guide on how to analyse data can be found here.
Using your impact:
Once you have analysed your data you can use it in different ways.
Internally , to improve your work:
- What has worked well? What hasn’t worked well?
- Which findings matched our expectations? Which findings surprised us?
- Which questions does our data answer and what is it telling us? Is it telling us anything else useful?
Your committee/trustees/board should always see your impact information to help improve their decision-making.
Externally, to tell others about how great you are.
- Share your results on your website and social media to reach potential service users, funders and supporters.
- Share it in your annual report, reports to funders, bids to potential new funders.
Disclaimer
We make every effort to ensure that our information is correct at the time of publication.
This is only intended as a brief summary of relevant issues and information. Legal advice should be sought where appropriate. The inclusion of other organisations in this information does not imply any endorsement of independent bodies, they are just for signposting purposes.
Voscur is unable to accept liability for any loss or damage or inconvenience arising as a consequence of the use of this information.
