While reporting can feel time consuming, reflecting on and articulating your impact is core to learning and sustaining your work. In addition, social impact measurement allows you to share back learning with your funders and community stakeholders.
For some organizations, the process of impact measurement might be more straightforward. For example, if you run a summer camp for students to learn about STEM career paths, your end beneficiaries are easily identifiable as the youth attending the camps. From there, your social impacts might be those youth succeeding in school or accessing post-secondary education.
For others, this model might not be as simple and could take additional steps to identify the end outcomes. The following are key considerations in order to successfully and accurately measure the impacts your program has:
1. Identify and focus on your end beneficiaries
Based on True Impact's approach to impact measurement, the first step in understanding your program's true social impact is to identify who the end beneficiaries of the program are. These are the individuals whose lives are being improved because of the work being done. So if you run a program that trains teachers, training teachers is part of the capacity development of your work while the end beneficiaries are then the students being impacted by those teachers. This is who will be represented in your Succeed stage of the impact model.
This question will be asked during the Impact Summary section of your report:
2. Determine how you are reaching these end beneficiaries
Because this is intermediary work, you are likely supporting these end beneficiaries indirectly. You will be asked to identify this in the report builder and then have the opportunity to share who you reach your end beneficiaries through (who is the intermediary you directly serve who then goes on to improve the lives of the end beneficiaries). In the teacher training example, while the end beneficiary is the student, the intermediary that you reach them through would be the educator. This is who will be represented in your Reach stage of your impact model.
3. Use best available data
In the True Impact tool, you’ll be asked to share the number of intermediaries reached and the number of end beneficiaries who succeeded (were meaningfully impacted). Often tracking the intermediaries reached will be much simpler, however, you may not currently track the total end beneficiaries who's lives are improved.
This is when we recommend using the best available data to tell your impact story. If you do not directly measure the impacts on the end beneficiaries, it is possible someone does. What we mean by this is whomever you are serving (teachers, businesses, nonprofit leaders, etc.) might already be tracking the impacts of those they serve and who you are identifying as the end beneficiary. While this means an additional step in your measurement process, gathering this data will help strengthen your story of impact and make your report even more compelling. Feel free to copy and use this sample outreach tool to gather the data from your own stakeholders to help measure the end outcomes.
If direct measurement is not feasible, you can also estimate end outcomes by using existing research, past program data, data for similar sorts of programming, or other methods that can help you draw connections between the work being done and the resulting impacts. For the program training teachers, you might point to this study which showcases that teachers who connect learning back to students' lives result in improved student learning. Therefore, if you train teachers on this, you can point to the outcome of improved academic performance.
Ultimately, we want to meet you where you are at in your measurement journey and if directly measuring is not yet feasible, that is totally acceptable!
4. Strengthen your measurement practices
Finally, this process may have elevated areas for improvement in your measurement approach. Perhaps you solely capture data of the teachers being trained, but you now see opportunities to gather student data to help tell the story of your organization's full impact. If this is something you want to improve upon, you can start by reviewing this list of measurement resources or reach out to the True Impact team directly for support and guidance.
Examples
The following table illustrates how we would represent various types of programs in an impact model:
|
Intervention type |
Who is immediately served? Reach |
Who is the end beneficiary and how are their lives improved? Succeed |
|
A program that trains teachers |
Teachers being trained |
Students improving their academic performance |
|
A program that trains volunteers to respond to disasters |
Volunteers being trained |
Community members improving safety |
|
An organization that regrants to local community organizations |
Grant recipients such as homeless shelters, local churches, and community cent |
1. Beneficiaries attain, retain, or improve housing 2. Congregation improves wellbeing 3. Community members gain safe and affirming environments |
|
An organization that incubates social change leadership and strategy |
Organizations, leaders, and impact entrepreneurs in the local ecosystem who advocate for policy change |
Community members that benefit from policy change and power building and ultimately gain financial strength |
|
An organization that co-designs programs to address community needs |
Stakeholders involved in the co-design process |
Community members then impacted by the program(s) created to achieve or improve food security |
|
A Housing Assessment for the city planning office |
Influencers activated through housing study |
Number of people who gain housing if study recommendations are implemented |
Finally, to fully illustrate the example of a teacher training program and how that would ultimately look in a True Impact report, review the following logic model example:
| Stage | Indicator |
|
Program Development |
1 program resource developed
|
|
Reach |
100 educators reached
|
|
Succeed |
2,000 students improve academic performance
|
