Measuring your impact
Measure your business’ impact by tracking your activities and outputs. This helps you:
- be aware of what you’re doing well and what you can improve
- show your customers, staff, funders and customers what difference you’re making, so they want to keep supporting you.
To track your activities and outputs, use measures or indicators. For example:
- if you run a course to help people get jobs (activity), record how many people attend your course (output), and how many of them get jobs (outcome).
- if you’re trying to improve people’s physical health, ask people how much fast food they eat in a week, what their blood pressure is or how much sleep they’re getting.
Decide which outcomes are most important to measure, then pick measures for those outcomes. An outcome is a positive change you want to make in people’s lives or for the planet.
Measuring your outcomes helps you know what difference you’re making. Identify different measures for different outcomes.
Measures criteria
When you decide your measures criteria, consider all the following:
- be specific – be clear about what you’re measuring.
- be measurable – make sure outcomes can really be measured or counted.
- be relevant – relate each measure to an outcome you want to achieve.
- think about timing – decide when to measure.
- be positive – focus on what you’re doing, instead of what you’re not doing.
- focus on outcomes – measure what’s happened because of what you’ve done, not what you did to achieve it.
When you choose measures:
- make sure they are things you have a direct impact on
- remember you can change what and how you measure as your business and impact grow
- use measures that show the positive change you’re making (your outcomes)
- look at measures from other businesses that do good, especially if their purposes are similar to yours.
Developing your measures
Follow these steps in order to identify and improve your measures.
The number of measures depends on your impact model, but four or five is a good amount to aim for.
Guide to develop your measures
- Step01
Choose outcomes to monitor
Pick the three or four most important outcomes in your impact model. These are the outcomes that show the change you’re making and if you’re doing a great job.
- Step02
Choose your measures
For each outcome, pick one or two things that can show how well you're achieving that outcome.
Collect different types of information, for example:
- numbers show the size of your change
- feedback shows the quality of your change.
- Step03
Identify where you’ll get your information
You could get information by:
- getting your staff to collect information about their everyday work
- surveying people
- researching publicly available data.
When you collect information, consider:
- if the source is accurate and reliable
- how you can collect only relevant information
- how you can make sure everyone gives the same information.
- Step04
Compare your information
Think about what you can compare your information with, for example:
- comparing sources of information
- comparing to similar information someone else has collected.
If someone else’s information shows they have a very different success rate from you, check what’s they’re doing differently.
- Step05
Decide when you’ll measure
Write down how often you’ll gather this information. Collecting it should be:
- often enough that you can respond if something changes
- not so often that collecting information becomes impractical.
How often you collect information is especially important for surveys. If you survey too often, people may get tired of your surveys and stop responding.
If you need to allow time for something to work before measuring again, think about how long that’s likely to take.
- Step06
Save your information
Record where you’ll save the information, so you can find it easily when you have to. Make sure the information is secure, especially if you save personal information.
Keeping records
Save the information you collect in a way that works for you and your team. What you save depends on how you intend to use the information. Here are three options to think about. You can use them together or separately.
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What to use |
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Cons |
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Notebooks |
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Spreadsheets |
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Databases or software designed for customer relationship management |
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