Planning for impact

Once you have identified what impact you want to create, the next step is to decide how to do that. In particular, you’ll have to decide which services or products (outputs) are most likely to bring about these changes. You’ll also need to plan how to assess your impact.

Impact before outputs

It’s vital to define your impact first, then decide on your outputs. Otherwise you could end up providing services that don’t deliver the changes you want.

With your impact in mind, you can then weigh up different service options to decide which is most likely to create the changes you want. For instance, you could use a simple chart to score service ideas against how well they are likely to deliver your chosen impact.

Example

Obviously, your decision about which services to offer will also depend on other factors such as:

• your budget
• the number of people you can reach
• the depth of impact you can achieve with each beneficiary
• other services already on offer.

Marketing principles can also help to ensure you develop the right services for your beneficiares.

Operational planning

An operational plan will help you ensure you have everything in place to deliver the impact you want.

Planning to assess your impact

Once you have planned how to deliver your impact, you will need to plan how to monitor your progress and evaluate your success. This doesn’t have to be a big undertaking. All evidence gathering should be purposeful; avoid just-in-case data collection.

Find out more about assessing impact.