Assessing impact

In order to know what impact you are making, you'll need to monitor and evaluate your work.

What is monitoring and evaluation?

Monitoring involves gathering information systematically about the progress of your project or organisation.

Evaluation involves judging the successes and failures of your project or organisation, often based on an analysis of your monitoring information.

What information can be monitored and evaluated?

There is a wide range of information that you can monitor and evaluate, such as:

Inputs: the resources you put into a project or activity, such as staff time, volunteers' time, equipment, expenditure and other assets. For example, you might want to check how much money you spend on a particular activity and then assess this against your expectations.

Activities: the work you do to make your products or services happen, such as running the organisation, planning a new service or producing promotional materials for it. For example, you could keep an eye on what staff and volunteers are actually spending their time doing, and compare this with planned activities.

Outputs: the products or services an organisation delivers such as training courses, publications, a helpline, or a website. For example, you might want to find out how many services are being delivered, of what type and quality, and who is accessing them.

Impact: the benefits or changes that happen as a result of your work. They include obvious changes, such as someone being housed, as well as less tangible soft outcomes, such as a shift in confidence or opinion. For example, you might want to capture someone's growing self-belief as they progress through a course. Learn more about impact.

Experience: the feelings people get from their involvement with your organisation. For example, you might want to find out whether your users enjoy or are satisfied with the service they receive from you, or how happy your stakeholders are when working with you. The importance of experience is developed further in the idea of full value.

What to focus on

It's impossible and unnecessary to measure and assess everything you do. So it is important to think carefully about what information you actually need and why. Only collect data you will use. Evidence to demonstrate your impact and track your outputs is usually the most important information to gather. The idea of impact marketing will help you with your decision.

Key performance indicators

For internal purposes, it's good practice to track at least some key impact and output indicators at every level, decreasing in detail as you move up the organisation:

• A staff member who delivers counselling may need information about the detailed outcomes they are achieving with their clients.
• Their manager may need summary data about the number of sessions, the types of clients, and the summary impact of all the counsellors’ work.
• The trustees may need just a single statement about whether the counselling service is behind schedule, on track, or exceeding its impact targets.

It is also useful to have some indicators that tell you about the experience of those using your services or engaged in your work.

Once you have decided what you want to track, you'll then be able to work out how you will do so. How do you set up a monitoring and evaluating framework?