Julie Andrews once said/sang “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start”.
She was wrong.
Although to be fair to her she wasn’t exactly talking about how to measure the impacts of your community investment. It was something about how singing can help you evade the Nazis or something. I wasn’t really listening.
Nevertheless when it comes to putting together a system to understand what impacts are, my advice is ignore Julie Andrews completely, she was dead wrong. In fact, the opposite is true.
The very first thing that you need to establish when you’re putting together an impact measurement framework is what you want to have achieved when you’ve finished with it. Ask yourself the question: “What does success look like?”
However this is really a two parter.
Firstly there is the external thing. What problems should it tackle? Who should it help? What impact should it have? How will the world be a better place as a result of your support?
Equally important, and perhaps slightly neglected, is what it should do for your company. In this case you want to ask a very different set of questions. Should it improve staff retention/engagement? Should it improve public perception of the company?
Practically it’s important not to ask everyone everything. The more you ask for the less you get. Rather tailor a few specific questions to help you understand the impacts. Nothing’s more of a turn off than vast surveys asking irrelevant questions.
Well… That and the Von Trapp family singers.
For example, if you have a community investment strategy that focuses on employee volunteering because you want to improve employee satisfaction, ask what effect it has had on volunteer’s morale.
So when it comes to measuring the impacts of your community investment there’s no point trying to measure everything. What you need to do is measure the impacts that are relevant to what you want to achieve.
If you want more help and advice on this topic please visit the LBG homepage.