Moving Guesses to Estimates or Direct Measurement
True Impact believes in employing a Best Available Data approach – we want all nonprofit partners to be able to share their impact stories, even if they don’t have extensive staff or resources dedicated to data collection and evaluation.
While we accept all data – from Guesses to Direct Measurement – we want to help you identify ways to improve the quality of your data over time to further strengthen your impact story.
How to turn a Guess into an Estimate
Estimates use existing or comparative data to forecast program impacts. If you don’t currently track impact data, you can estimate similar results based on your previous work, other organizations’ work, or existing research.
If you are selecting Guess for your measurement type in the True Impact platform, consider if you can take any of the following approaches to improve the quality of your data:
- Review your program's previous reports, if relevant, to anchor your impact data on your program’s previous achievements.
- Identify a regional or national organization that does similar work to you. Search their websites for annual or impact reports to get a sense of the scale of their impacts and consider whether you’d expect to see similar results with your program.
- Search for relevant research to support your impact claims. Here are a few websites that compile reliable research on specific topics/programs:
- What works for health (evidence-based health interventions)
- What works for re-entry (tools and data resources for criminal justice and related fields)
- What works for youth development (evidence-based interventions to support healthy youth development)
- What works for education (The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews the existing research on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education)
When you use one of these approaches, we’ll ask you to share information about the sources and assumptions you're using to estimate your impacts. Your response might look like:
- In [X program year], we served a similar number of people and achieved [X impacts]. While we are not measuring impacts for this current program year, we expect to achieve similar results.
- [Project X] at [organization name] achieved [X impacts] from their similar type of services (cite annual report or data source). We expect to achieve similar results through programming in our community.
- Based on [X study], research shows that [X%] of people participating in a program like ours achieve [X impact] (cite study). We expect to achieve similar results through our programming.
How to turn a Guess into Direct Measurement
For some indicators, you might be able to do some quick and easy data collection to capture data. It doesn’t have to be an extensive time and resource commitment! We know some data collection efforts can be large undertakings – there’s a time and place for that, but not all data collection and evaluation tasks require a lot of time and resources.
You can implement simple systems to track and analyze a few pieces of data that will help you (1) better understand your program impacts to support program improvements and (2) improve the quality of the data you share with your funders. Ways to do this include:
- Sending a short form to program participants and/or program implementers to fill out at the end of your program to gather feedback about the outcomes you want to achieve. See here for some example templates you can tailor and use to collect data.
- Using an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Microsoft Forms, to collect data – these resources will often do some of the analysis for you too to help you better understand the overall impacts for all respondents!
Additional Resources
We hope this helps you find quick and easy ways to improve the quality of the data you use to improve your programming over time and share with your funders.
For a deeper dive on how to directly measure outcomes for your program, check out our Top 5 Data Collection Best Practices resource in our Help Center!