5 strategies to demonstrate your organisation’s impact
Social purpose organisations play a vital role in addressing the needs and challenges faced by local communities. Demonstrating your organisation’s positive impact on the community is crucial to maintaining your org’s accountability and transparency to its stakeholders.
It builds trust and credibility which, in turn, assures key people that their resources are being put to good use.
Resources aren’t the only thing on your mind of course! Having a track record of positive impact can also be a tool of advocacy for your cause, helping to improve community support and engagement.
5 ways to show impact
There are a lot of ways to show off the impact your organisation is making in the community. We will share some basic ones with you today, but you can get as creative as you like.
1. Define Clear Objectives and Goals: This is key to showing the progress your organisation has made later down the track and helps keep your org accountable to it’s mission and purpose.
Initiate the process by establishing Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) objectives and goals for your organisations mission and programs/services.
2. Collect Data: Data is proof of your efforts. It is imperative you collect data in order to show hard evidence of impact.
Gather both quantitative and qualitative data related to your organisation's activities and outcomes, such as surveys, interviews, reports, case studies, and more.
3. Establish KPIs or OKRs: Identify and monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI) or Objectives and Key Results (OKR) that are directly aligned with your goals. These tools will help you measure your performance.
Choose which one works best for your org. KPIs focus on measuring performance and progress against specific targets, often numerical and quantitative. OKRs are more inspirational or qualitative, and focus on setting goals.
4. Use Data Visualisation: Transform your data into clear, easily digestible visual representations such as graphs, charts, and infographics. These visual aids are a great and simple way of displaying your data to stakeholders so they can quickly understand what they are looking at.
Note: If the data is for a board report, using infographics for complicated data is a good way to save your board time, but make sure to use a mix of data and visualisation. If the data is for the public or other general stakeholders, more visualisation and less number-heavy data is a good way to show off your success.
5. Share Success Stories: Highlight individual success stories and case studies that exemplify positive changes brought about by your organisation.
With AI more prominent than ever, the best way to connect with people is through story telling. Stories are extremely individual to us, and while everyone is using AI to create content, having your own (or others’) stories to tell will always help you produce original and authentic content that will resonate with your audience.
Plus they are tangible sources of your organisation’s impact!
That’s already five but we can’t resist giving you one more — let’s call it a bonus:
*Bonus tip*
Hold an event for stakeholders: A great way to both engage and present your success to your key stakeholders is by holding an event. Dinner, charity fundraiser, wine and cheese night - choose something that will be of interest your audience.
By holding an event, you are proactively reaching out to stakeholders, building relationships and educating, all while impressing everyone with your orgs impressive results.
Make sure you are choosing the right activity for the right audience. For example, your board might care about your KPIs but the people in your community might be more interested in listening to happy stories.
We’ll be sharing five more tips on how you can demonstrate impact in our next blog. In the meantime, you can follow us on social to see how we share our impact every day.
