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.