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Understanding Your Impact

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Understanding Your Impact

Taking a deep dive into understanding your impact helps you discover how your mahi can have better outcomes in your community.

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A good place to start is to set out how you think your work makes a difference in people’s lives, or the environment.

This step is called a Theory of Change or an intervention logic. The main purpose of this step is to identify how you make a difference and discuss the assumptions you may have made about how change works.

The image below shows a basic Theory of Change.

Put simply, ‘if’ represents the activities you do, and ‘then’ represents the difference it will make. This results in the ‘impact’ you are wanting to have.

A Theory of Change is like a series of ‘if-then’ statements and assumptions

Context

Our children deserve the best start in life.

we support parents to be able to parent their babies and children safely and well...

Then

we will see more children and young people develop the necessary learning foundations needed for life.

Impact

More children, more engaged in learning, having success as learners.

Think about each step in the series above. What makes you think that if you do this, it will lead to impact? What evidence base are you using? Putting this down is a great way to be able to communicate what your work is about, and why it should have an impact.

You will need data to support your understanding

Collecting data is important for understanding your impact, but data isn’t all about numbers. You will want to collect data about the people you work with such as numbers of people you serve, their age and ethnicity, and you may also want the ‘voice’ of the people you serve which might be collected from interviews.

You will want to understand what their needs are: Do they have low incomes, or mental health challenges, or special learning needs?

It is often easier to work with an external impact measurement specialist or evaluator who can provide a fresh perspective and dive deeper into the evidence base.

When thinking about selecting an evaluator, consider the following:

How do you want to use the work? Are you clear on your objectives and can you communicate that clearly?
Who would be a good fit for your organisation? Will you understand each other and be able to work constructively?
Is their work robust? Have you seen any of their earlier work?
Can they undertake the work within the budget you have available?
Will their model provide useful insights for your type of impact?
Are there other stakeholders whose perspective you might seek in advance?
If you want a social impact analysis so you can understand the social return on investment - look for a specialist in this area.