Measuring your Impact.
There is now a requirement amongst funders and commissioners that voluntary and community organisations can provide measurable evidence of the impact or change that the activities they provide make to communities and individuals. Recent years have seen a shift from simply counting inputs and outputs (for example, the number of people using a service) to measuring outcomes (the difference that the service has made to people).
More importantly, measuring impact enables an organisation to monitor and evaluate the social impact their activities are having on people. If someone asked you right now, “What does your project achieve?”, what would you say to them? How do you know how it’s going, what works well, and what doesn’t? Measuring impact enables you to answer these questions knowledgeably.
What do we mean by Impact?
The word impact can be replaced with words like ‘change’, ‘effect’, ‘outcome’, ‘benefit’ and ‘result’, but they all largely mean the same thing.
You’ll hear people talking about demonstrating and measuring impact, which means taking a step back and thinking about the difference you make through the work you do and collecting data to show this.
Your impact may be the difference that you make to those who directly use your service, to those in the local community more generally, or to wider society. The impact you highlight can be wide-ranging and can affect many aspects of people’s lives.
The benefits of measuring impact
Collecting data on the difference your project is making has many benefits:
- Helps you think through the problem you’re tackling
- See how you are doing and how you can improve
- Helps plan what you are going to do next
- Tell your story and inspire others
- Attracts further funding and investment
- Raises awareness in the local community
Impact Practice
These are the activities that you do to focus on your organisation’s impact. These can be simply split into 4 steps:
