Impact Assessment Guide
A free resource designed with product giving at its heart.
What’s in the guide?
This step-by-step guide is designed to help whether you are just starting to measure your impact, or are looking to develop existing evaluation methodologies. Within the guide we’ve included some links to other organisations that have created helpful templates and centralised lists of national data sources.
The guide will walk readers through four stages, from understanding the language used to measure impact, mapping a project’s impact pathway, the steps to converting outcomes into social return on investment (SROI) and the ways you might use and share your results.
This guide can be used for a whole organisation or a particular project. If measuring impact for the first time, we suggest users follow the guide from start to finish. If you are familiar with impact measurement, it may be helpful just to refer to sections on specific areas of interest.
Who is it intended for?
This guide is a free resource, designed to support charitable organisations including charities, community groups, social enterprises and schools. If you have any questions, contact Charlotte, Partnerships and Impact Director.
How will it help charities?
Charities are increasingly expected to demonstrate measurable impact, including the value of less tangible outcomes like increased confidence and wellbeing. Impact measurement can also help an organisation assess internally whether it is achieving its purpose and improve both planning and operations. It can help to:
- Understand your organisation’s purpose
- Plan your strategy
- Attract funding and secure new contracts
- Improve your operations and make them more efficient
- Enhance marketing, communications and stakeholder engagement
The guide was piloted in spring 2019 with five charities in our network, each with a different level of experience in impact measurement. Their invaluable feedback has helped to shape the guide and make it accessible for charities of any shape and size. We are so grateful for their time, efforts and insight into the practical application of the guide within their teams.
Why have In Kind Direct made this guide?
Being part of the pilot for this project helped us to reassess the evaluation we were doing for some of our services already. Working through the guide helped us understand the sorts of statements we wanted to be able to make in our publications and to funders and so helped us to ask the right questions to begin with. We learned that each time you work through an impact pathway you learn something new, and it is worth the effort to better understand the difference your services make to people.”
Caxton House Community Centre, London
“We have measured our impact before but the guide gave us a usable framework to be more structured in our approach and think about how we will demonstrate our outcomes when we are planning our work. We use products from In Kind Direct in a lot of our service delivery so it’s helpful that the examples in the guide focus on this.”
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