Measuring Your Organisation's Impact
If you help to run a Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisation, how many times a week do you measure or record your organisation's impact?
This needs to be something that you do as a regular part of your daily work, according to Guy Dobson, our VSCE Advice Officer.
"The impact that any voluntary sector group has on its beneficiaries, community or environment really is the crucial factor in terms of establishing that organisation’s effectiveness, value and credibility," said Guy.
"It’s crucial that stakeholders, funders and local authorities are fully aware of the beneficial outcomes of any given project, and the positive difference that has been made as a result. Really, it’s as much about demonstrating as it is about measuring."
Earlier this month, Guy ran a session on 'Measuring Your Impact' at the Gloucester VCS Network meeting which we held at the Advice and Resource Centre in Matson. The Gloucester VCS Network is one of six that we organise in the various districts of Gloucestershire.
At Guy's session, he described a four stage ‘Impact Cycle’ which organisations can use to make sure that they remain responsive to the ever changing needs of the community around them - and have plenty of evidence of this to show to funders and other stakeholders.
- Plan how to create the desired impact. This involves defining your issue and audience, agreeing your impact and outcome goals, and what positive difference you hope to achieve. Write down your plans for change, and think about what activities you will undertake to achieve these goals. Measure your performance against key goals by researching what data already exists to use as a bench mark, decide what extra data you want to collect, involve service users in the process, and be aware of GDPR and research ethics.
- Do: this is the actual process of collecting your data, which might mean 1:1 interviews with beneficiaries, focus groups, observations, testimonials or case studies. You might also want to be more creative, especially if working with children or young people, for example by pretending to be a news journalist and using mock TV interviews, or playing games which might show how young people feel about your services.
- Assess: make sense of the data you collect, which could be qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative data is mainly numerical and shows changes such as how much the attendance at a weekly youth group has increased. Qualitative data is ‘softer’, such as comments made by group members about which activities have worked well for them and which haven't.
- Review: learn how to improve your work by interpreting the findings to identify conclusions and lessons. Then communicate your findings to your stakeholders and funders, produce an impact report, and clearly summarise your impact with infographics where possible.
If you’d like to know more about this process or discuss how it might look for your organisation, please contact Guy via guyd@grcc.org.uk
GRCC's VCS Networks are free to join via the sign-up form here.