Organizational-level reports are commonly needed if funding was not directed to a specific project but instead to the entire organization / unrestricted funding.
Many of our support resources are geared toward project-level Social Impact Reports. This article outlines key tips for building an organizational-level Social Impact Report.
Why is this kind of report important?
Although your organization likely already has (or will have) an Annual Report outlining your impacts, translating a high-level version of it into the True Impact platform will support your funder in understanding what percentage of your annual impact can be attributable to their financial support. This calculation is incredibly beneficial to funders who need to continue to justify the importance of contributing unrestricted funds to organizations. The True Impact platform calculates this by understanding how their investment in your organization compares to your total expenses for the given time period and then uses this information to attribute a portion of your broader social impacts to their support.
Tips for completing your report:
- Title: Please include your organization's name and relevant years in your total. For example: Nonprofit Name 2021 - 2022 or Organizational Name FY 21 - FY 22.
- Description: Please include a brief description of your organization's mission.
- Date Range: Please include the date range requested by your funder which is most likely to be a fiscal year, calendar year, or contract dates. Ideally, these dates should align with the investment amount associated with the report.
- Stage: Please select your report stage based on the following guidance:
- Initial: reporting period is just beginning or hasn't yet started and you will forecast your organization's anticipated outcomes.
- Interim: reporting period is underway and you will forecast your organization's anticipated outcomes.
- Final: reporting period is complete and you’ll be reporting accomplished results.
- Intervention: Please do your best to select categories that align with your organization. If you can't find a perfect fit, that's okay - just select something. The Additional Information section here has a longer word limit and is a good place to add more information about your organization's strategy, approaches, or programming that did not fit in the short intro overview.
- Beneficiary Demographics: Please do your best to include estimates here for some key categories that make sense to your organization. Ideally, including some categories in age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status are helpful. For US-based organizations, US Census QuickFacts is a great resource to find demographic estimates for cities, states, etc.
- Outcomes: If you are struggling to identify a logic model that captures the entirety of your work, please reach out to the True Impact team for support. For these kinds of reports, we mainly recommend focusing on the Reach and Succeed sections. Program Development may make sense if you have information to share about how you strengthened your organization internally. Learn and Act don't tend to be relevant for organizational-level reports unless you have one very focused kind of programming, so you can most likely skip these sections. Select a few Social Impact indicators that represent your work organizationally for the year. We typically recommend reviewing your Annual Report to see what you're already sharing and translating a few high-level outcomes listed there into Social Impact indicators. You can copy/paste a bit of context about the impact into the indicator and note that they are Directly Measured via your Annual Report. Your Reach value should be the largest number on the report and be inclusive of all Social Impact indicators. An example of what this might look like is outlined below.
- Reach: 5,000 people reached by our organization in one calendar year across our housing, health, and education programs.
- Succeed:
- 1,000 attained, retained, or improved housing
- 500 students improved academic performance
- 3,500 people improved, protected health
- Documentation: You can attach your Annual Report to the report as this will likely be helpful supporting documentation.
- Budget: You will most likely need to leverage the expenses spent that are reported in your Annual Report. Ideally, these expenses align the with dates listed earlier in the report. If there's a conflict between the dates your funder is requesting and the budget data you have available, please reach out to True Impact to discuss. Most likely we'll either support you in updating your report dates to align with your expenses and impacts OR recommend you add a note that you are using proxy expense and impact data based on what you have available through your existing Annual Report data.
- Narratives: Please copy and paste a few select notes from your Annual Report or other existing resources into the Lessons Learned and Success Story narratives. Please try to include a photo in this section as well (a screenshot from the Annual Report works well).
If you have any questions about completing your organizational-level report, please don't hesitate to reach out to the True Impact team.