SOCIAL IMPACT
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Social impact is the change your activities have on people and society. Understanding your social impact requires more than monitoring your services and gathering feedback from beneficiaries. How are you changing lives and can you evidence it? Taking a structured approach to social impact will help you target your efforts as a team and evolve your direction as an organisation.
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Mapping your organisation's work in a Theory of Change can help frontline staff understand the big picture and where they fit in. Using service design methods such as ethnographic research will ensure your programmes are built around the needs of your beneficiaries. Integrating impact measurement into the flow of your activities will help you find efficiencies and identify natural points for data collection. And once you've captured the information, data visualisations will help your organisation make better decisions and communicate with your stakeholders. Far from being an adminstrative burden, generating evidence should be seen as an opportunity to become more effective by improving how you understand and communicate the value you are delivering.
Theory of Change > Service Design > Impact Measurement > Data Visualisation
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The following questions will help you identify your gaps and decide where to start...
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Theory of Change: Can staff explain it, and do they use it to guide decisions about how to allocate their time and what improvements should be made?
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Service design: Do you understand the challenges and experiences of your beneficiaries - why and how they engage with you - from their perspective?
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Impact measurement: Which data do you need to make decisions, and what is the most efficient way to collect it?
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Data visualisation: How might you make data more accessible (comprehensible) to all key stakeholders?