| How do I make impact interesting? | Turn all that impact data into stories. Build support and hope by showing how your work makes a difference. |
If you’ve resisted impact measurement before, there is a very good chance it’s because the terminology just isn’t interesting. It can be hard to find the best words to describe the path forward, and even harder to show that your work is exciting, important, and worth exploring. Impact stories may be the answer for your cause.
Words like “vision”, “strategy”, and “impact measures” fail to capture the way your heart starts to beat a little faster when you realize that you can change the future. But, these words offer glimpses into challenges every organization will experience. These words exist because other people have gotten stuck — and become unstuck — right where you are now. Understanding, and finding impact stories that communicate these measures can link structure and passion for your cause.
For some of us, the hardest thing about impact measurement is that it takes a big, inspiring vision and reduces it to small, individual components. The minute you try to capture those individual steps or observe yourself in action what felt so natural and so inspiring can feel too small or too cold squished into a line in a spreadsheet. What felt so big suddenly may feel small.
If it feels so uninspiring at times, why bother studying impact at all?
The power of impact measurement is what happens after you collect all your impact measures. Once the spreadsheets are filled with numbers and links, once those cold hard facts are staring you in the face. only then can you start to tell compelling stories.
Impact gets analyzed for patterns. You find stories in the data. You capture the true meaning of all that information with a simple, powerful story.
Armed and inspired by the data, you get to show staff and volunteers how their actions bring your vision to life. You get to paint a picture to show donors how their collective support makes it possible. You can portray the ways that partners and the community shape your work. All these stories give hope to the people who need this work to succeed — for their health, dignity, and lives.
Collecting information may not be thrilling, but seeing your community grow will absolutely make your skin tingle. Learning from your impact and improving will definitely fill your heart with hope.
The best thing about impact measurement is the stories that it generates. These stories attract support, build momentum, and propel you forward. Impact stories make change feel real, and that feels really, really great.
Impact measurement and impact stories cannot replace strategy. You can follow staff around collecting impact data and documenting change until the cows come home. You can package it into beautiful speeches and presentations that look great. But impact stories will ring hollow if your impact work isn’t linked to a strategy.
Why are you doing this work? What happens if you succeed? What’s at stake if you don’t accomplish your goals?
An organization’s “strategy” is the goal you seek and the way you spend your time trying to achieve that goal. It communicates what you do and why, and it evokes an understanding of what happens if you don’t act.
If we do X, then Y will happen.
Impact measurement never tells you what the goal or the intended results should be. Leaders and experts define X and Y. Impact measurement and stories observe what happens when people bring Y to life.
A strategy is a simplified theory of change. A theory of change is a model that describes what change (impact) an organization or activity can or should have, and how it will achieve that change.
In handbooks, a theory of change is supposed to be developed through a long process and written up in a detailed technical document. In practice, a theory of change can be summarized in 1-2 sentences.
You can apply the model at any scale, from a movement to an organization to a project to a campaign. For example:
Sometimes one project’s impact links to something larger. You can create a chain of impact stories linking one project to an organization or movement:
When you know your strategy, impact stories write themselves. First, you collect data that shows what you did; then data that shows what happened.
In the case of the community garden strategy, perhaps you acquired the land, created the garden, recruited volunteers, assigned the plots, and managed the garden for the first growing cycle.
Impact measures are the acquisition of the land, the people who participated, and the gardens created. Every impact story is your model in action. Here’s the story of a group of people who created a community garden and the families that they fed. Here is the story of the teachers across the country who used the toolkits in their classrooms and the feedback they received.
We did X, then Y happened.
It’s that simple.
The Organizer is a newsletter for people working to create equitable and sustainable communities. Whether you are part of a nonprofit, a charity, or a social enterprise, this newsletter is for you.
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