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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.

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

Click here to find out more about Organising for Growth and download the full report.

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!

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.

The Impact Pyramid

Organisations setting out to manage their impact more effectively need to do so using a coherent approach that brings together the different moving parts. Through dozens of impact management projects over the last 5 years we’ve developed a simple model - the Impact Pyramid.

The first thing to do is to build a solid base. We label this monitoring. It is about taking care of the fundamentals, also known as your outputs. It is absolutely essential to be able to record and retrieve information about who, where and how much? This is also where you differentiate participation by personal characteristics such as age cohort, gender identity, ethnicity etc. Good quality monitoring is really important for accountability, KPI’s associated with service level agreements, and assessing the ebbs and flows of demand over time. However, monitoring does not tell you whether your work has been effective. For that you need the next layer of the pyramid.

Next we have evaluation. Here, the focus shifts to your outcomes. In what aspects of their life is a difference being made for your beneficiaries? And what is the extent of that change, is it a little or a lot? We support many of our clients to develop comprehensive outcomes frameworks that explain clearly what outcomes are generated and what specific indicators will reveal progress being made towards securing these outcomes. To complete the framework we’ll look at what evidence collection tools (such as questionnaires and surveys) are needed to capture the relevant data at key intervals.

Finally, the tip of the pyramid: learning. Ultimately managing impact requires having accurate data that produces insight into What Works. By taking time to look carefully at patterns emerging from monitoring and evaluation reports we can identify valuable results and good practice that we can celebrate and share, as well as revealing what may need to become a focus for future improvement.

If you’re keen to enhance your organisation’s impact and require support we’d love to help. Our consultancy packages are very affordable, as is our bespoke CRM system - CIMPL.

Metanoia - a shift of mind

This article is a taken from the Introduction to The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge, first published 1990, revised 2006.

METANOIA—A SHIFT OF MIND

When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.

The most accurate word in Western culture to describe what happens in a learning organization is one that hasn't had much currency for the past several hundred years. It is a word we have used in our work with organizations for some ten years, but we always caution them, and ourselves, to use it sparingly in public. The word is "metanoia" and it means a shift of mind. The word has a rich history. For the Greeks, it meant a fundamental shift or change, or more literally transcendence ("meta"—above or beyond, as in "metaphysics") of mind ("noia," from the root "nous," of mind). In the early (Gnostic) Christian tradition, it took on a special meaning of awakening shared intuition and direct knowing of the highest, of God.

"Metanoia" was probably the key term of such early Christians as John the Baptist. In the Catholic corpus the word metanoia was eventually translated as "repent." To grasp the meaning of "metanoia" is to grasp the deeper meaning of "learning," for learning also involves a fundamental shift or movement of mind. The problem with talking about "learning organizations" is that the "learning" has lost its central meaning in contemporary usage.

Most people's eyes glaze over if you talk to them about "learning" or "learning organizations." Little wonder—for, in everyday use, learning has come to be synonymous with "taking in information." "Yes, I learned all about that at the course yesterday." Yet, taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, "I just read a great book about bicycle riding—I've now learned that."

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning. It is, as Bill O'Brien of Hanover Insurance says, "as fundamental to human beings as the sex drive."

This, then, is the basic meaning of a "learning organization"—an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future. For such an organization, it is not enough merely to survive. "Survival learning" or what is more often termed "adaptive learning" is important—indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, "adaptive learning" must be joined by "generative learning," learning that enhances our capacity to create.

A few brave organizational pioneers are pointing the way, but the territory of building learning organizations is still largely unexplored. It is my fondest hope that this book can accelerate that exploration.

Let's make an impact together in 2021

Make 2021 your year of Impact

Make 2021 your year of Impact

About Your organisation:

  • You will be a charity, charitable foundation or social enterprise with an annual turnover of £1—5 million

  • Your annual report presents impressive numbers showing how busy you are, but the story of your effectiveness hinges on a few carefully selected case studies

  • You have a complex network of funders and find that it can be very challenging to manage your reporting obligations to them

  • It is not uncommon for an upcoming reporting deadline to send a ripple of panic through your teams

  • You have never developed an overarching impact framework that consolidates your various outcomes into a single cohesive model

  • You collect lots of data but struggle to interpret it in ways that support the communication of your impact story

What I will bring:

  • 20 years’ experience of strategic leadership in the social sector

  • 4 years’ experience of in Impact Management consultancy, supporting 40 organisations to develop their reach, impact and resilience.

  • Learning from past and present clients including Lloyds Bank Foundation, Greggs Foundation, Northumberland Council, Gateshead Council, YMCA, Age UK, Mind, Save the Children and many more.

What will change as a result:

  • Your organisation will become optimised for greater impact at every level

  • A common philosophy of impact will become embedded from the frontline to the boardroom

  • You will learn what aspects of your work are reliably making an impact, and where improvement is required

  • You will provide a more transformative service to your beneficiaries

  • You will give existing funders with greater assurance that you are able to deliver what you promise

  • You will present a more compelling case for support to potential funders

  • Your systems for measuring, monitoring and managing outcomes will be enhanced, using labour-saving digital technologies

To book a zoom call to talk about your requirements in more detail email: impact@goodlabs.uk

#ThousandTrees

UPDATE: In December 2021 we hit our target of 1000 trees planted. We’ve decided to continue as we began and look forward to our hitting our next milestone of 2000!

As a business specialising in impact management it’s only right that we lead by example. As an expression of our concern about the climate emergency, and as a commitment to do our best to tread lightly on this beautiful planet, we are delighted to become an official partner of the global reforestation charity One Tree Planted.

Find out the full story below…

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#ThousandTrees is our pledge to plant a forest of 1000 trees over the next 2 years. Over the course of their lifetime our trees will sequester an estimated 500 metric tonnes of CO2. We have chosen to plant our forest in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and a place that, due to its extreme poverty, has seen rapid deforestation in recent decades. Reforesting the hills of Haiti has a double bonus, as the trees not only sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but also protect against deadly flooding and landslips during hurricane season. Another benefit is to halt erosion, which combined with over-farming and poor agricultural methods, has destroyed the region’s soil, making it very difficult to grow food. The Goodlabs forest will help restore nutrients to the soil. Parallel programmes alongside the planting will teach local farmers how to use the land responsibly and profitably. Due to the tropical climate trees planted grow faster than here in Britain so the benefits of the scheme are realised more quickly too.

To find out more about One Tree Planted and how your business can partner to grow your own forest click here.



Intro to Impact Management

Is impact a good thing?

Impact isn’t generally used in a positive sense - as anyone who has had a prang in their car knows. Indeed, the dictionary defines it as “Forcible contact or collision”.

Impact generally leaves a noticeable impression. It often produces a change in shape. So why do we use the word impact in the context of the lives of the people that we work with? 

It is helpful to think of impact in the artistic sense of the word, for example a sculptor chipping away to bring out something special and valuable.

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Speaking the lingo (definitions)

Impact sits within a wider cluster of ideas that relate to the effectiveness of the services that we deliver, including:  

  • Outputs, which tell us how busy we have been:
    They typically count of the number of times we did something,
    e.g. provided 17 coffee mornings attended by a total of 28 older people.

  • Outcomes, which tell us how effective we have been:
    They summarise what changed as a result of the activity/service being delivered, e.g. 75% of participants reported being less socially isolated.

  • Indicators, which are the building blocks of evidence:
    They are the specific things we track in order to show an outcome is being achieved, e.g. reducing sugar intake and walking more are both indicators of physical health.

  • Impact, which describes the overall effect of our work:
    Patterns in outcomes data over time are used to tell the bigger story of how a service is making a difference within a population, e.g. We saw a moderate improvement in the health of 65-75 year old men last year.

Sector Trends

When Impact first came on the scene the preoccupation was with measurement. There was a sense that collecting lots of data reassured organisations of their professionalism. Over time organisations realised that they were accumulating lots of data but lacked the ability to interpret and understand the story that the data was telling them.  

Impact Management is a more recent development that places the emphasis on being very clear on what data is being collected and why. Within Impact Management the aim of reporting on Outputs and Outcomes is in order to understand what aspects of a service are being effective and to identify where it is proving more challenging to achieve positive change. Data is used to aid reflection and learning, with a view to continuous and intelligent service improvement.

Social Impact

Within the world of Impact the phrase Social Impact is often discussed. This represents a desire to make claims about the ‘knock-on effect’ of organisational impact through the wider social system, e.g. reductions in A&E admissions or reduced demand on Social Care services. ‘Social Return on Investment’ sits at the most difficult end of impact reporting involving complex mathematics and economics based on principles such as ‘Attribution’ e.g. how can you be sure that the improvement you saw in the wellbeing of a client was due to your intervention and not some other factor?

Expert economists have produced a variety of databases containing a wide range of ‘Financial proxies’ which seek to apply £ values to the outcomes achieved, e.g. frequent moderate exercise has a wellbeing effect of £4179. It is fair to say that within the sector are both enthusiasts for, and sceptics of, the £ values proposed in these economic models.   

Where next?

If you’d like to have a chat with us about how impact management can be used to drive improvement within your charity, social enterprise or business just drop a line to: impact@goodlabs.uk

Covid-19 Local Data Maps

At Goodlabs we believe that accurate and transparent data is absolutely critical to good decision-making.

People have been telling us that the vital data required to compare Covid-19 impact around the country is buried deep in Government websites and not easy to find.

To make life a bit easier for you two of the key data maps illustrating deaths occurring due to the disease are shown below. They are fully interactive and provided by the Office for National Statistics.

 
 

Creating an Impact Framework

Creating an Impact Framework

Change must not be left to chance. Before deciding where to invest their money in your organisation Funders and Commissioners need to be reassured that you can reliably deliver result. This short webinar by our MD, Matt Wilson, provides an overview of to begin putting together a framework for measuring, monitoring and managing the impact that is being made by your charity or social enterprise.

Impact management and cancer breakthroughs

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One of the biggest medical stories of the year so far was last week’s announcement that a new gene test can be used through which “70% of women with the most common form of early stage breast cancer can be spared the agony of chemotherapy". The method applied in the new cancer research is a perfect case study for anyone interested in impact management.

Much like complex medicines, the majority of change-oriented human services are not single-hit remedies but rather combined intervention packages that combine to create an effect over time. An employability scheme may involve life-skills training, mock interviews and work experience. A drug rehab scheme may bring together medication with one-to-one counselling and group therapy. You’ll be able to think of many more examples.  

An impact management approach always strives to ask not simply “what is our success rate” but to go deeper asking “what can we discover about who our intervention is and isn’t successful for, and why”. That’s the question that drove the breast cancer research team to make their breakthrough. They discovered that for the majority of women treated the chemotherapy element of the intervention proved to be wholly ineffective and unnecessary. So is this a question that your organisation is giving due consideration to?  

At Goodlabs we believe that a disciplined approach to service delivery, supported by appropriate data collection and the opportunity for the delivery team to regularly reflect together on results is essential to generating these sort of breakthrough insights.

Finally, a related ethical question worth considering is, “If you discovered tomorrow that an element of your service provision is ineffective for a certain client group – what would you do?” What if that service is part of a commissioning package for which you are well paid? How likely would you be to implement changes to your model, and how quickly? Would you begin to screen out certain clients from your service – after all, why waste their time and yours? Could you re-design aspects of your service to better meet the needs of those for whom it is found to be ineffective?

All vital questions that today’s social leaders need to be wrestling with! Do leave a comment to let me know if any of this resonates with you.