We’re being bolder with how we measure our impact
We’ve been publishing an annual impact report for 5 years. The most recent one showed that we’re solving more problems than ever, and that our reach, driven by our website, has never been bigger.
It’s essential that our impact work is credible. We use an externally validated model, we make sure we don’t overclaim, we even discount our calculations to take account of our own biases. This is really important as the numbers we talk about are pretty huge. We save the public purse over £400m a year and we generate value for our clients of £12 for each pound spent. So we have to be able to demonstrate that these values are reliable.
This year, we got an external auditor to go through our impact model. It was really painstaking work — they unpicked every part of it, chased down every reference, checked the sourcing of every number. It was worth it, though, as they gave us “reassurance’ (basically the highest score they could give) which means a green light for our work.
In their report, the auditors said we could now afford to be less conservative and there are a few different ways we can do that. One thing they suggested is expanding the amount of activity we include in our impact calculation. At the moment, we include 15 different client outcomes, as they are the outcomes we felt we had the best evidence for. But that misses out a lot of our activity, particularly around health and social care outcomes. So this year we’re looking to expand the evidence we collect, to give a fuller picture of the wide range of our impact.
We’re also expanding our impact measurement to include our advocacy work as well as our advice work. This is hard — we need to demonstrate that these effects wouldn’t have happened without us. And on top of that we need to acknowledge that we’re not the only organisation advocating for change — there’s a whole landscape of other NGOs, local politicians,national politicians, regulators and service providers we need to consider.
There’s no off-the-shelf model we can use for this, so we’ve worked with external consultants to develop an approach which we can now use to help us set priorities internally. We’d be really interested in hearing from other organisations in our line of work who are struggling with this problem — do get in touch.
The purpose of this isn’t just to come up with a bigger number. It’s good for us as a charity to be able to tell a more complete story, and make bigger claims. It’s vital for our local network to be able to do the same. But the whole point of measuring your impact as a charity is to know where you make the difference. By being bolder, we’ll understand that better.
