Mastering impact assessment

Impact assessment isn't just a buzzword; it's a strategic approach that propels organisations toward greater societal contributions. Impact management involves analysing, adjusting and enhancing the outcomes of your activities, but it isn't just about ticking boxes; it's about creating a meaningful and lasting social impact on people and society. 

In this article, we're delving into the world of impact management, equipping you with tools and insights to continuously assess and evaluate your organisation's social impact.

Why Impact assessment Matters

Picture your organisation's activities as ripples in a pond. Impact assessment is the art of understanding the magnitude and direction of those ripples. It's a process that goes beyond collecting data; it's about deciphering the stories behind those numbers, recognizing the lives impacted, and enhancing the lives yet to be touched.

Building a strong impact assessment process requires a measurable Theory of Change and a bulletproof data strategy, as these two will allow you to collect the correct data to evaluate and document your impact.

If you don’t have these two, you should read our blog posts “How to create a Theory of Change” and “How to setup a data strategy to measure impact”.

Getting on top of impact assessment

With a Theory of Change and a data strategy in hand, you’re now ready to assess your impact data. 

• Make your data tangible: If you are to leverage the potential of impact assessment, you need to make data easily accessible and understandable. Otherwise you’ll spend too much time looking at spreadsheets, dragging data to make diagrams, trying to get an overview. Try to set up ways for your data to be easily tangible in order to minimise the boring part of impact management.

• Analyze with purpose: Data without analysis is worthless. Dive deep into your data to uncover trends, anomalies, and opportunities for improvement. You should look both on a large scale and if possible on an individual level. This way you’ll be able to detect differences, challenges and such.

• Adapt and Optimize: Impact assessment isn't static; it's a dynamic process. You should aim at using impact management as a way of using insights to adjust your activities for maximum positive change. You may not be able to adapt your current intervention, but it will be important learnings to keep in mind for future work.

• Utilize Technology: Today, Impact assessment is largely done digitally and with technology. However, it easily becomes complicated and time-consuming, if you need to access three different systems to first collect data, second move data, and lastly visualise and analyse data. Bet you’re already tired, just thinking of this…

With Impactly, you can collect data and get it visualised in real-time. That way you can easily analyse your intervention's effect and the participants' progression, and share data with your stakeholders on-goingly.

See, how Impactly makes impact assessment easy

The human touch in impact assessment

Behind every statistic is a life, a story, and a journey. Impact assessment goes beyond graphs and pie charts; it's about human lives positively influenced. 

Numbers can only tell you so much, but if you don’t include qualitative input as well, you might miss something. For example, if a participant breaks a leg, gets divorced or is fired from the job, that will likely impact his progress in some way. 

If you don’t collect data on these sorts of events, you’ll miss important insights and knowledge, that’ll potentially lead to a weaker impact reporting.

So remember to include external events, as they could be significant for your intervention and your overall social impact.