What can Social Impact Measurements do for you?
DSC Associate, Rob Foster, shares some of the practical uses of Social Impact Measurements ahead of his training session
The use of Social Impact Measurements (SIM) is an extremely important method of capturing information about the real and tangible impact that your work is making on the lives of your beneficiaries and society! Here are the top 5 ways you can use it to help your organisation:
Developing an evidence base
SIM can be used as an evidence base for a variety of different purposes. Externally, the impact of your work can be used as a tool to help influence decision makers in Government, the private sector, the public sector and beyond. Internally, you can use SIM to help you make key decisions about how to invest money across your activities ensuring that you prioritise what you do well and understand where you can improve.
Helping your organisation change
Having an in-depth understanding of the breadth, impact and reach of your work is vital when you’re considering making changes to the way your organisation works that will help shape the future. SIM will also give you a realistic expectation of what change will bring so that all parties involved will have a clear idea of what change is in-store.
Managing your supply chain
With a clearer understanding of your organisation’s social impact, well-being, financial and performance measures, you’ll be able to do better compliance reporting and contract management within your supply chain. In turn, this will have a knock on effect along the chain enabling you to communicate your performance in a more timely and meaningful way to regulators and commissioning bodies. It will also allow you to look inward and get a real sense of how your staff and suppliers are performing.
Getting the message out
Once you’ve undertaken your SIM you’ll be able to create a series of key messages about your work that are easily digestible and can be rolled out across different platforms for a variety of different purposes including: sales, marketing and public relations. We all know it’s a highly crowded and commoditised market, thus having a strong understanding of your impact can be a powerful way of standing out from the crowd and provides you with an opportunity to model yourself as an example of “best practice”.
Proving your case
Being able to demonstrate your impact to a funder is universally important across the sector. If you’re in receipt of a Social Impact Bond (SIB) or looking to evidence a Return on Investment (RoI), being able to prove your impact is key to hitting performance milestones. Whilst being able to emphatically prove your case to funders you’ll also have created a body work that will be interesting to a variety of different stakeholders from user groups to political supporters.
