There’s no doubt about it, deciding what community activities to measure the impact of can be daunting. Where should I start? How can I measure the impact of all my activities? How do I find out what to actually measure?
1. Choose what community programs you would like to measure
Just remember, you don’t have to measure everything. In fact, LBG encourages you to prioritise your activities and concentrate on measuring the impact of those activities most important to you.
56% of LBG members believe lack of clarity over what to measure is one of the key barriers to impact measurement, so it’s important to choose carefully the programs which you would like to have impact data for and how this information will benefit your organisation.
2. Start mapping your impact and identifying relevant indicators
Once you know what activities you’d like to measure, it’s time to go into more detail and identify the areas of actual, or possible, impact. This is where LBG can help – we can provide you with an impact toolkit that can help you to:
- Identify the gaps and opportunities for impact measurement
- Develop indicators that can be used to set relevant indicators to assess impact
- Create a project summary can be used as the basis for conducting assessment
3. Ensure you have clarity on who is responsible for collecting data
Impact measurement takes time, so it’s important that there is capacity to do it right. Make sure you liaise with your community partners to define roles and responsibilities in the measurement process. You’ll also need to ensure that you have someone in your team that can lead on engaging with them and up-skilling them if necessary.
LBG members have access to consultants at Corporate Citizenship to help them train their community partners.
4. Consider different data collection methods that are available
There are a range of methods you can use to collect impact data (see below). It can be overwhelming at times to decide what method you would like to use, but it’s important to choose a method that works for your organisation. LBG’s impact assessment tools provide ready-made templates for you to build on.
- Surveys
- Semi-structured interviews
- Focus groups
- Online systems
- Excel
- Survey
- Focus groups
5. Don’t forget about the analysis
Whether you need the impact data for management and review, reporting indexes, communications or awards, it’s crucial to understand how you are going to interpret and report data. LBG can help to analyse your community data, through benchmarking your community program against your peers.
If you’d like to find out more about how LBG approaches impact measurement, we are running a free webinar on the 3rd of May 2018 to help businesses to find their route to impact.