You’ve been asked to complete a Social Impact report by your funder, now what? This article explains our top tips to complete your report like a pro!
True Impact’s Approach
True Impact is on a mission to make measurement easier—and more valuable—for nonprofit organizations and their philanthropic partners. By supporting you in creating reports through our online platform, we hope to make reporting more streamlined and universal.
Our standardized impact reporting platform serves to make it easy for nonprofits to forecast, measure, and report on program or organization level impact. To get the most out of the platform, here are some things to keep in mind as you begin your reporting process:
1. Capture the impact story of the program or organization being funded, not just a grant amount
To make your reports more universal, report on the full program (or organization if funds are unrestricted) that received funding so the report can be shared across funders. You’ll want to include outcomes and budgets for the program at large and not just a portion funded through a grant. From there, True Impact will do the work to attribute a portion of the outcomes to your funder based on the percentage of what they have funded. Focus on your full impact story and we will do the rest!
2. Utilize the information you already have
Much of what you will be reporting on should already exist on your website, in your grant agreement, in an annual report, etc. Pull from what you already have to reduce the burden of recreating - especially for the overview, intervention, and beneficiary sections. We hope most of your energy will be dedicated to completing the outcomes section, so do your best to breeze through the beginning steps.
3. Focus on the intended outcomes of your end beneficiaries
While how you conduct your work is incredibly valuable, True Impact reports focus on the end outcomes of that impactful work. When navigating through the impact model in the outcomes section, make sure you are keeping your end beneficiaries in mind. For example, if you train teachers to better serve their students, the students are the end beneficiaries who are ultimately having their lives improved because of your programming.
4. Tailor your report by making the success indicators your own
To capture what success looks like for your organization, use the success criteria section for each indicator to make it your own. We offer generic definitions of what we mean for each indicator, but we encourage you to tailor them to what makes sense for your program. For example, our description of "improve social and emotional wellbeing" is "people that materially improve their social, emotional, or other wellbeing as a result of the program." In the success criteria section for this indicator, you might tailor this to be "the total number of students that report increased sense of belonging in their school community after participating in the program" to better highlight your program's outcomes.
5. Use your best available data to back up your outcomes
When selecting your outcomes in the system, you’ll have the opportunity to share how it was measured. We understand some end outcomes might be trickier to track, so we accept your best available data. This is also an opportunity to better understand where you might have opportunities for growth in measurement! If you find yourself selecting “guess” often, consider looking into existing research and data to back up some of your assumptions.
The above are some great starting points as you begin your reporting journey with True Impact. If you have not yet done so and are interested in a deeper dive into the True Impact approach, platform, and top tips, we encourage you to review our pre-recorded training or find additional resources on our Help Center.