The Impact of Volunteering

It was a really busy start to 2025 here at Goodlabs. Since January we were deeply involved in delivering a significant evaluation project on behalf of several voluntary sector organisations across the Tyneside area.

Commissioned by the North East Combined Authority, this ambitious evaluation centred around the £1 million UKSPF Volunteering & Social Action Project, a regional initiative designed to expand volunteer participation, enhance community engagement, and strengthen local voluntary organisations.

Working with seven major VCSE organisations (including Connected Voice, Volunteering Matters, VODA, Community Action Northumberland, Blyth Valley CVA, Northumberland CVA, and The Key), we aimed to capture the wide-ranging impacts volunteering has in the region. Our task involved getting to grips with a large volume of data and evidence gathered over 18 months of project delivery, plus putting out our own surveys, running focus groups and holding lots of structured interviews. All of this then required extensive analysis from which we could draw conclusions and make recommendations.

One particularly important focus was on Supported Volunteering Pathways—programmes that guide people facing barriers to employment towards meaningful volunteer opportunities. Our findings reaffirmed that volunteering serves as a powerful vehicle for personal growth, increased employability, and social inclusion, positively influencing both individuals and their communities.

The evaluation has highlighted volunteering as not simply as an act of one-way altruism but as an exchange of mutual benefits. Volunteers gain new skills, confidence, and social connections, while voluntary organisations build capacity and resilience, in order to make a larger and more enduring community impact.

We’re proud that our evaluation and recommendations will contribute to improved collaboration and strategic learning within the sector. Significantly, we hope our recommendations will inform and enhance future funding frameworks, creating sustainable, equitable financial structures between the Combined Authority and voluntary sector organisations in the region.

All in all the project has been really rewarding and provides a great showcase of Goodlabs’ skills in evaluation, strategic analysis, and collaborative working within the voluntary sector. We're optimistic that the insights provided through our work will pave the way for strengthened community action, better supported volunteering pathways, and enduring social and economic contributions across Tyneside and beyond.

Cimplify on-the-go!

Cimplify on-the-go!

Salesforce App – Stay Connected Wherever You Work

Did you know that you can also access Cimplify on the go via the Salesforce app which is available from the Apple App store and Google Play store.

Accessing Cimplify via the Salesforce mobile app empowers your team to manage beneficiary interactions effortlessly on the go, ensuring important updates and insights are always at your fingertips. With mobile accessibility, your charity can look up and record activities away from the desk—making your CRM system more flexible, responsive, and aligned with the realities of frontline charity work. The mobile app is ideal for youth groups, outreach services, or support meetings at community venues, you can:

  • Record Data Instantly: Take registers of group attendance or log client interactions in real-time.

  • Boost Productivity: Eliminate paperwork delays by entering and updating your data on-the-go.

  • Easy to Use: Intuitive design ensures even non-technical users feel comfortable and confident.

  • Secure and Reliable: Benefit from Salesforce's robust security while accessing Cimplify remotely.

The app is now available for free to all users with either full or platform licences.


Portal Access for Volunteers and Sessional Team

Do you involve volunteers or sessional workers in your charity's daily activities? Often, organisations want these valuable team members to complete simple yet important tasks—like logging attendance at support groups or recording mentoring sessions—without giving them full access to the entire CRM system.

Cimplify's new portal offers an effective solution:

  • Secure Individual Logins: Each volunteer receives their own secure login, managed easily by your admin.

  • Tailored Access: Volunteers only see the data relevant to their role—perfect for a volunteer group leader who interacts with specific beneficiaries.

  • Cost-Effective Pricing: From just £1/user/month.

  • Mobile Responsive: Access the portal smoothly from any device, anywhere.

Set-up is straightforward with affordable one-off fees, making it easy to expand secure access to your wider team without stretching your budget.

Interested in seeing how a portal could benefit your team? Send us an email to find out more.

Impact Masterclass in Newcastle

Making Impact Count: Highlights from Our Charity Impact Masterclass

This month, we were delighted to deliver a Charity Impact Masterclass in partnership with RBC Brewin Dolphin at their Newcastle offices. The event, hosted by Charity Investment Manager Jeffrey Ball, brought together charity leaders from across the region for a practical, energising session on how to better understand, evidence and maximise the difference they make.

It was brilliant to see the room full of people so engaged in this vital conversation. At the heart of it all was a simple but powerful question: how do we really know we’re making an impact?

Our founder, Matt Wilson, opened the session by sharing a series of ‘impact maxims’—practical principles drawn from over 20 years of working alongside charities. These are the kind of reminders that help teams stay focused on what matters most, even when things are busy. One that struck a chord with many attendees was:

“Outputs tell us how busy we are but outcomes tell us how effective we are.”
– Matt Wilson, Goodlabs

It’s a simple but game-changing mindset shift that keeps impact front and centre from day one.

Next, our CRM expert, Abi Green, took the baton to lead a hands-on session exploring the data side of the impact puzzle. She shared best practices for capturing and analysing meaningful data—without making it a burden—and showed how our charity CRM, Cimplify, can help track the full beneficiary journey. It’s all about turning data into insight, and insight into action.

One attendee summed it up perfectly:

“All too often impact reporting just includes the data, but it’s the ‘so what?’ that matters.”

Exactly that.

A huge thank you to Jeffrey and the team at RBC Brewin Dolphin for hosting us, and to everyone who attended and contributed so thoughtfully to the discussion. It was great to pass on some practical tips, renewed clarity, and fresh inspiration to demonstrate the powerful work the region’s charities are doing.

Celebrating 800 years!

Goodlabs is proud to have become a Gold Sponsor of North Shields 800.

Whilst we have customers all across England and Wales we’re really proud of our roots in Tyneside. So much so that when the opportunity came up to become a sponsor of our town’s 800th birthday we just had to join in.

The North Shields 800 initiative marks the origins of the town on the banks of the river way back in 1225AD. But it isn’t just about history - the project celebrates the past, present and future of the town.

Find out more on the North Shields 800 website and see if there are any events that take your fancy.


North Shields’ historic Fish Quay with the ‘Low Light’ building standing at the edge of the harbour.



Cricket for Good

Making cricket accessible to people with disabilities

Having completed some really interesting projects with sports organisations focused around Football, Rugby and Skateboarding we’ve now begun a really exciting piece of work with Durham Cricket Foundation.

The top flight club, based at the incredible Riverside ground in Chester-le-Street has big ambitions for the future. Responding to new initiatives by the English Cricket Board the DCF is keen to grow its community programmes in terms of reach and impact. Goodlabs have been appointed to support the board and leadership team through the process of formulating a new strategy, rooted in insightful stakeholder consultation.

In addition we’ll help the Foundation to analyse and interpret data from their wide range of community activities in order to produce a new Impact Report to be published alongside the new strategic plan in 2025. There’s so much going on all across the age spectrum and all around the region. We’ve already been pleased to see a really strong inclusion agenda through which cricket is opening up all sorts of connected opportunities for groups of people who often feel left out.

To find out more about the Durham Cricket Foundation click here.

The Value of Cultural Education

We’ve been pleased to support the Northumberland Cultural Education Partnership through 2023 and 2024 with an evolving portfolio of work to evaluate its delivery work and explore its role and priorities going forward.

One of the most interesting strands of the work was to produce an external evaluation of a very interesting project involving hundreds of young people across a number of schools in the county. Whenever we undertake evaluation work we tend to have two things in mind. Firstly, we want to establish the extent to which the project has fulfilled its objectives and outcomes. Secondly, we hope that the reports we write might also become a resource for learning, made available to a wider network of stakeholders who have an interest in the subject matter, in this case, arts & culture education.

The project being evaluated was really fascinating as it included the use of a unique outcomes framework developed by the innovative arts charity Mortal Fools. Seeking to understand the links between arts participation and wellbeing the model, called ‘PERMA’ invited young people and teachers to reflect regularly on Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement.

An enormous amount of data had been collected over the course of the project and a big part of our task was to analyse and interpret it. Presenting complex data in simple ways is something we consider very important at Goodlabs - it’s a running theme through most of our assignments. In this case we used ‘stock and flow’ charts to demonstrate the correlation between observations, highlighting distribution ranges as well as averages. The advantage of this approach is to be able to quickly see the general trend as well as any outliers.

If you’re having challenges understanding and communicating the story that your data is telling drop us a line, we’d love to help you get to grips with it.

The Impact of Community Organising

It was a pleasure to be in east London for the launch of a substantial new report describing the positive impact that can be made when local churches begin to employ the principles of community organising.

Click here to access the full report.

We’ve been providing consultancy support to the team at the Centre for Theology and Community (CTC) who, along with Citizens UK, have been running the ‘Organising for Growth’ project.

Funded by the Church of England, the project has worked within six parishes located in communities experiencing a range of complex social and economic challenges. However, the fascinating thing about Community Organising methodology is that even in the most difficult of situations it steadfastly refuses to become deficit-defined. Rather, there is a hope-full attitude, rooted in a strong belief about the inherent capacity people possess to change the circumstances around them, especially by working together. This belief is strengthened within a faith-based context that honours the essential dignity and equality of each person.

Having completed an interim evaluation in 2021 this has been a particularly longitudinal study that has provided a special opportunity to observe changes occurring as a sort of time-lapse. Having been first introduced to some of the key people involved in the work more than three years ago it has been fascinating to observe their journeys.

The event itself, inclusive and ecumenical in nature, was a real pleasure to be part of. Whilst hosted in an Anglican context (the historic St. George in the East, Shadwell) key parts were played by Catholic and Pentecostal clergy and congregations too. There were some lovely, poignant moments, and a lot of joy, as people reflected with gratitude on meaningful change taking place at the intersection of the community and the church.

Notes:

Click here to find out more about the work of CTC

Citizens UK defines Community Organising as:
“Bringing people together to win change. This means building community-led solutions to big and small problems, that work for everyone”. Find out more at: citizensuk.org/about-us/what-is-community-organising/

 

Decisions, decisions...

We know that choosing a CRM product can be bewildering. There are lots of different products out there, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. To help steer you onto the right track take a few minutes to look over our Cimpl decision tree. It will help you make an initial assessment of whether our product should be added to your shortlist. And remember, we offer a live demo even if you’re still just browsing.

Complex Needs, Cimpl Data

Woman using charity CRM system

People can be complicated, but data shouldn’t be

A charity in the West Midlands recently asked for our support to transform their data management practices in relation to the recording of interactions with their clients. Their service users have multiple and complex needs, often relating to mental health, addiction, or both. A range of services are offered including 1:1 support, group work and also accommodation.

Through our Cimpl CRM for charities we were able to migrate them over to a more efficient and organised way of operating. No more client data hiding in Word documents hidden on Sharepoint, in Teams or even worse, on staff C drives. Now the whole team has role-related access to the clients relevant to their service. For management, reporting has been brought to life with realtime dashboards providing insight into service demand month by month. Clients presenting risks are more easily identified meaning that creating a safer environment for everyone.

The moral of the story is that whilst people may be complex, data can still be Cimpl!

CRM for Veteran's Charity

Veteran's charity using CRM

Charities come in all shapes and sizes, serving all sorts of different groups in society. We were pleased to be asked to support a Veterans charity for the first time.

Veteran’s HQ Liverpool provides much-needed support to hundreds of ex-servicemen and women right across the Merseyside region. The leadership team of the charity and its committed volunteers were beginning to struggle to keep track of all the many diverse requests for support and a busy schedule of participation in a range of groups and activities.

Using our Cimpl CRM application which utilises the security and versatility of the Salesforce platform we were able to deliver a user-friendly and cost-effective solution. In order to ensure that new users to the system had the best possible start we travelled to Liverpool to deliver in-person training.

In particular the in-built report and dashboard features that Cimpl offers have transformed the way that the charity reports back to its various funders, really taking the sting out of producing detailed reports on activity and impact.

Don’t be shy to get in touch if you’d like a demo of how our Cimpl CRM could make a difference to the way your charity manages its data.

The Power of Messaging

Charity CRM messaging app

Cimpl has a new messaging partner: ValueText

We are always working on ways to improve our CRM application: Cimpl. One of the things we’ve been wanting to add for some time is an integrated messaging service as an alternative to email.

This requirement was really important for a new charity CRM client, a mental health charity based in North Wales. They need to keep in close contact with their service users as their 1:1 and group programmes tend to be quite dynamic. For their service users email is not a channel they use often for communication, but they all have mobile phones. Two-way chatting and also the ability to bulk message to a wide range of different lists was essential.

After testing a number of third party products we chose to go with ValueText. The quality of their solution, ease of use, great customer service and most of all highly competitive pricing (including a charity discount) made them stand out from the competition.

Having live tested this solution for several weeks we’re now really happy to offer it to all of our Cimpl customers who also wish to make the most of the power of messaging!

5 Steps to Increasing Your Impact

By our MD, Matt Wilson. 10 minute read.

 

As we enter 2024, there is more work than ever for charities to be undertaking. Goodlabs gears its support towards smaller charities operating in frontline service delivery across a range of sectors from young people to older people, from mental health to domestic abuse, with much more besides. In every area, we see the cost of living biting, statutory services creaking, and charities bravely stepping up to support people at the sharp end. We also see every pound that charities fundraise having to go further, and every hour they work having to achieve more.

Against that backdrop, I’ve reflected on the 5 things charity leaders can do to ensure their organisations make a bigger impact this year.

 

Step 1: review your strategy to ensure impact is at its heart

In a typical year, I support four or five charities to review or write afresh their strategic plan. The question at the heart of every charity strategy ought to be “What is the impact we will make?”

I see lots of strategies with objectives and goals dealing with money to be raised, growth to be achieved, staff to be recruited, governance to be restructured and so on and so on. All those points may well be important, but if they are divorced from the central question of impact to be made then a dangerous risk emerges: your organisation may find itself slipping into merry-go-round mode.

Sadly, I see this too many times, annual reports with lovely infographics that show “we’ve been very busy” but behind which there is very little evidence of whether that busyness has any effect.

So what can you do?

Why not take an afternoon out of the office with a handful of key team members who aren’t afraid to be honest. Look over your strategy together asking:

1.    Where are our beneficiaries in this plan? Are they in the foreground, the background or underground!

2.    How good of a job does our strategy do in terms of focussing on the dimensions of personal and social change that our purpose expects us to deliver on?

3.    How clear is the relationship between the strategic objectives and goals we have set ourselves and the impact that we want to make by the expiry date of the plan?

If you find that your strategy already does a great job of fulfilling each of these three tests, fantastic, you can go into the year with confidence. If you don’t, then you’ve gained some really valuable insight into where you need to give some leadership attention in the months ahead.

That insight can be the first step on a journey of improvement towards making this year truly impactful.

 

Step 2: Get more from your Theory of Change

Since first making waves in the charity sector about 10 years ago Theory of Change has become a staple part of the strategic toolkit for every social change organisation that takes its work seriously. Funders too continue to show a keen interest because a Theory of Change can make clear the way that a charity reliably delivers its impact according to a well-understood journey.

Every Theory of Change practitioner takes a slightly different approach but we are all basically just riffing on a common underlying model. Each year, I help to create ToC’s for around half a dozen organisations. Over time, I’ve come to see where the value tends to be delivered, and when a Theory of Change may become an unhelpful distraction. There is a very real risk that, if not done well, a Theory of Change document can do the opposite of making your work easier to understand – it can make it more confusing!

A well-produced Theory of Change will utilise words, shapes and graphics to clearly visualise the answers to important WHY, WHO, WHERE, WHAT and HOW questions. In doing this it ought to straightforwardly lead the reader through a series of related processes toward the ultimate question: SO WHAT? I would always expect the answer to this question to be described in thematic terms connected to the impact that has been made in the life of an individual, group or community as a result of supportive intervention.

The other big benefit of giving time to working on a Theory of Change is more of a byproduct of the process of putting it together. Always take time to consider who you will involve in creating your Theory of Change as being involved will offer a double benefit:

1) Those involved will better understand the way all the moving parts of your delivery model work together to create impact, and

2) You will gain too, from the valuable insights they will bring into specific parts of the process that may otherwise have remained a bit of a mystery.

 

Step 3: Take hey thematic, approach to Outputs and Outcomes

Much of my impact consulting work is done with the Lloyds Bank Foundation’s “Enhance” programme. They’re a really great funder, committed to supporting charities holistically with practical as well as financial assistance. When I get introduced to a charity for an impact-related assignment one of the first things I’ll do is a quick matrix audit of all the Outputs and Outcomes the charity is being expected to report on for all their various funders. This frequently involves long lists of data points being tracked. In one case I know of, over 200! Local commissioning teams can be a nightmare for over-monitoring, and UKSPF projects, which I’m dealing with a lot, seem to have been created in the ninth circle of hell!

A large part of the challenge relates to making sense of poorly articulated frameworks. Outputs (measures of what has happened) are frequently confused with Outcomes (what changed as a result of what happened). Numerous targets may exist that require an answer from somewhere e.g. “Number of beneficiaries with X”. If sufficient thought isn’t given to where these answers will come from the reporting back process can become incredibly stressful.

Following on from the last step about working on your Theory of Change, make sure that you’ve identified a set of clear impact themes that describe the difference your work makes e.g. a Mental Health theme, a Work Skills theme etc. These themes are like labelled suitcases into which you can pack Outputs and Outcomes that belong together. As you undertake the sorting task try to eliminate duplication. Do you really need one indicator labelled ‘Self-worth’ and another labelled ‘Self-esteem’? Codify the themes using numbers so that you can straightforwardly collect and connect evidence back to the theme, e.g. “Theme 2. Physical Wellbeing; 2.1 Improved Hygiene; 2.2 Improved Sleep….” When I’m working with a client I usually push for brevity with the expectation that we might be able to whittle down to no more than around 6 themes maximum, each with 4 to 8 items inside.

With this task completed you can go ahead and book that meeting with the commissioner or grant manager of the funded work you’re delivering. Explain to them the process you’ve been going through and the reason why.

Your goal is to help them understand that:

(a)  you are totally committed to tracking the impact of your work

(b)  you can be trusted to get on with it without the need for (their) external micromanagement

Once they’re convinced of these things they’re more likely to be willing to flex around what and when you report back to them, and potentially to reduce the number of data points down to the things that matter most in terms of impact.

 

Step 4: Get your Forms in order

Over the last three weeks I’ve covered Strategy, Theory of Change and Output & Outcomes. Today’s advice will focus on probably the most undervalued aspect of impact management within any nonprofit: Forms. They’re the Cinderella of the impact world. Often completely overlooked and yet with a bit of fairy dust they can become the star of your impact ball. Ok, enough Disney, let’s get down to business...

It’s impossible to demonstrate your impact without gathering evidence of what’s happening as a result of your work being delivered. As the French forensic science pioneer Edmond Locard was fond of saying “Tout contact laisse une trace”… “Every contact leaves a trace”. Forms are our best friend when it comes to collecting evidence consistently and systematically over time.

Here are my top 3 forms tips:

1. Think people first. Give sufficient thought to how the form will actually be used in the field. Who will be completing it? If it’s a beneficiary - what is their literacy level? Are your questions or statements (i.e. agree/disagree) phrased unambiguously? If staff are completing the forms are they properly trained? Do they have sufficient time to complete the form without rushing and turning it into a “ticky box” exercise?

2. Codify carefully. Ensure that your forms (and/or individual items on them) link back to specific items on  your outputs and outcomes framework. This is where using digital form technologies really deliver efficiency savings over manual methods. Doing this will take all the pain out of reporting results later.  

3. Be consistent. Whether using off the peg assessments such as SWEMWBS or self-designed metrics the key is to stick with a method and avoid either (a) chopping and changing, or (b) collecting patchy data. If you get the feeling that a form isn’t working well for you and/or your beneficiaries then don’t kneejerk react. Ensure you complete the full cohort before making changes, otherwise you risk making your dataset worthless. Similarly, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of your impact if you only have data from 20% of those you’ve worked with. 

 

Step 5: Upgrade your tech, let a CRM do the heavy lifting for you!

First let’s recap… We began with a strategy review, considered your Theory of Change, looked at your Outputs & Outcomes and then considered collecting better evidence by getting your forms in order. Now the final piece of the puzzle – upgrade your tech – get a smart CRM that will do the heavy lifting of impact reporting for you.

When I founded Goodlabs in 2017 and began working with my first client I also had my first encounter with the challenge of trying to report on Impact using a system that simply wasn’t designed for that purpose. It was a situation that I would encounter again and again and again. I’ve seen all sorts of cobbled together solutions involving Spreadsheets, Google Forms, Survey Monkeys, and piles of paper – often within the same organisation, and sometimes when £££ thousands have been spent on a so-called CRM that isn’t fit for purpose! Days if not weeks of painstaking work goes into producing impact monitoring reports for funders and commissioners. But it doesn't have to be like this!

This is one reason why I look back on the enforced lockdowns of 2020/2021 with a kind of gratitude. Yes, it was an awful time on so many levels, but for many of us it provided time out in which we could think and innovate. For me it gave the opportunity to begin designing a CRM system that would deliver all the common things that my impact clients needed. It gave me the chance to reach out to some smart people to help beginning to develop a working model. Following a number of live trials in 2022 the product finally launched in January of 2023 under the name “Cimpl” with a tagline mission statement “Making Impact Easier”.

The best way to gain consistent and reliable insight into the impact your services of having on the lives of your beneficiaries is to embed your monitoring tools within delivery. Make it part of your daily or weekly interactions with them. Make it easy for your team members to note their observations of change in just a couple of clicks. Make it easy for those you’re helping to give feedback on how they’re feeling at different intervals in their journey. Cimpl is designed from the ground up to do all that.

Right now we’re working on our 17th system implementation, with several more in the queue. It’s exciting to see organisations making the switch and feeling the benefit of Cimpl’s functionality relieving their long-felt sense of impact-anxiety.

If you’d like to take a look at Cimpl for yourself to see how it could serve your Charity or Social Enterprise just click here.

 

This article was first created as a 5-week mini series for our LinkedIn followers.