Impact of the Future
The year is 2030: The impact measurement market has become too contrived. People had started measuring because it got them funding, and funders measured their own programmes because that was what you did. In most instances, data, insight and impact were never joined to create a coherent picture.
People like 360 Giving had started to blaze a trail, attempting to disrupt the formative, summative evaluation approach that dominated, and the continued, persistent trend around organisations achieving negative outcomes despite large sums of investment, or the burning platform of weaponising people’s data. This all helped to steer the sector towards a new way of doing things — the post-evaluation era.
By 2030, a model has emerged based not on counting outputs or commissioning for outcomes, but on understanding, recognising and investing in the proxy qualities, characteristics and conditions that modern evidence showed us could deliver the greatest ‘real world’ impact. Led by a group of funders who sought to be the change they wanted to see in the world, they stopped funding silo/direct/low-quality evaluation work and started to ask for something different from the social sector. Inspired, a set of continuous improvement organisations — such as design agencies, impact measurement agencies and more — opened their doors, reframed their thinking and collaborated to usher in a new way.
There were many things that occurred but one of the most impactful changes that the funders drove, in collaboration with the sector, was the development and wide-scale roll out of a range of more achievable and useful proxy indicators that could quickly, easily, affordably and accurately estimate whether impact was being made. The Proxies, as they became known, included measures such as assessing an organisations approach to improvement, or whether organisations demonstrated a clear strategy related to their own goals rather than chasing funding, or how customer-centric organisations were in how they worked. There were, of course, many more.
The results, at first, were mixed. Colleagues disagreed with each other vehemently; some argued for impact, others made the strong case for building people’s capacity, some thought it was just too hard to change the status quo. Nevertheless, we pushed on and now we are where we are. working in a way that does not reduce or induce providers towards pointless measurement, or funders towards pointless commissioning or continuous improvement providers towards pitching for such work because it was all that was available. Indeed other things played a role such as Collaborative Hubs, the removal of application forms, the introduction of organisational plans and even the proliferation of tech and people-led approaches. We will never know the exact attribution but we see the results in our ability to tackle social problems faster, better and more meaningfully everyday.
You can see the benefits across all parts of the system. Funders are much more open and collaborative, sharing, connecting and interpreting their data as a whole system. Providers focus energies on delivery and the conditions for quality, and individuals outcomes are moving up. Finally, continuous improvement providers connect and complement rather than compete and reinvent. The ecosystem is healthier and other ecosystems look to us as a model for what actually works. The only question for the upcoming 30 years is, what’s next?
