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How do I interpret the social impacts of my community partners?

If you're reading an Impact Receipt or data dashboard and would like to better understand your grantees' social impacts (or succeed indicators), here is some helpful guidance.

The Succeed stage of the logic model is where we spend most of our time analyzing data from your grantee reports. Although this data can be very powerful, it's important to keep a few things in mind:

  • People can acheive multiple social impacts. For example, one person can gain social networks/supports AND graduate on time.  Both social impacts are valid and each succeed indicators should be interpreted as a unique indicator of success. If you sum up all the values of your Succeed indicators this total should be interpreted as the "total number of successful outcomes" instead of the "total number of improved lives." It's important to keep this in mind when trying to translate your impact to other stakeholders.
  • In most cases - but not all - our Succeed indicators are measured in people units. In data analysis efforts, we do our best to group impacts by measurement unit. However, it's important to keep this in mind when interpreting information from your data dashboards. 
    • Here are some examples of Succeed indicators that utilize people as the measurement unit:
      • protect, improve health
      • beneficiaries gain safe and affirming environments
      • students access post-secondary education
    • Here are some examples of Succeed indicators that utilize other types of measurement units:
      • businesses created, saved, or strengthened
      • acres of land cleaned, protected
      • dollars ($USD) in total socio-economic savings
  • Your grantees' impacts might not align fully with your priority outcomes. We recommend that nonprofits capture their full theory of change in their social impact report. This allows you, the donor, to understand the full impact of the programs you fund while making it easy to focus on the specific outcomes that advance your goals. You can work with your True Impact Social Impact Manager to highlight the outcomes that matter to you most.