Issue 25: Focusing on impact

Welcome to the latest edition of Charities Network, the newsletter for charity leaders dedicated to helping you grow.

In this issue, we look at impact — measuring and reporting it, exploring best practices in managing impact as well as sharing examples of successful impact reports and how to improve readability and storytelling.

Showcasing impact is not just about securing funding or marketing, though an important tool it is to do that — it’s also about accountability, aligning brand and purpose, and highlighting the need/next steps to close the gap between current state and ideal vision of the world where the problem you are tackling no longer exists — the endpoint of your charity’s mission.

What’s in this issue?

• Impactasaurus: Drive improvements by avoiding vanity metrics
• Improving impact management for Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind — a case study from Investing for Good
• Designing an impact report: a few key considerations
• A Catalyst guide: Why readability is important for your charity

Drive improvements by avoiding vanity metrics

Article by Impactasaurus

Measuring social impact is normally undertaken to attract funding, but its biggest benefit is driving positive change within your organisation. To unlock this potential, you must avoid vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics is a term used in the startup world. It describes any metric which does not relate to the business’ goals and cannot be used to inform decisions. Perfect examples include website views and social media followers. Increasing website views may make you feel good, but it does not measure a business goal and does not offer any guidance on how to improve.

To assess change, you must first understand how well the goals of your organisation are being achieved. Remember, change is not always beneficial, without monitoring your performance, a change could be detrimental. Once performance monitoring is available, changes can be made and their effect on your performance observed. Metrics which tie actions to observed results are called actionable metrics.

Outputs

In social impact, an organisation’s outputs are vanity metrics. Outputs detail what your charity has done or produced. For example, how many interventions or workshops have been conducted. Outputs are easy to measure and are important in understanding your impact as they describe your reach. However, they are not useful for learning and improvement, as they rarely relate to your goals. I have yet to meet a charity whose goal was to run workshops, they are just the chosen medium for achieving social change.

To illustrate the point, consider a charity which performed 100 workshops last year and 90 the year before. Clearly we can say that they are outputting more, but is this good? Are the workshops helping towards the organisation’s goals? Are the beneficiaries actually benefiting from these workshops? Without being able to answer these questions, we cannot assess change.

Outcomes

Outcomes describe the result of your organisation’s efforts. For example, the improvements to a beneficiary’s well-being as a result of an intervention. Measuring outcomes allow a view into the success of an intervention, and as such, there is scope to learn and improve. It is key that the outcomes being measured do relate to your goals, otherwise any efforts to improve them will be misplaced. Tools like theory of change allow mapping from long term-goals to outcomes, ensuring they are aligned.

Finally, to learn from your outcomes, you must understand what actions affect them. For example, if a new intervention is introduced, did it outperform the status quo? To be able to answer this, your outcome reporting must be capable of reporting on different segments of your data.

Segments are a subset of your data which have similar attributes. In this example, the data could be segmented based on the type of intervention, allowing comparison between the new intervention and the incumbent. With this capability, organisations can innovate quickly by trialling new approaches and assessing their performance.

Focusing on actionable metrics

To improve as a sector, we must take a leaf from the startup world and focus on actionable metrics. In the case of social impact, measuring outcomes which are defined based on your goals is a great start. The next step is to make them actionable, by understanding how your actions affect your outcomes.

👉 Impactasaurus is a simple tool for soft outcome measuring and reporting.

Resource

Theory of change is a process which helps leaders to think about how they believe the charity’s activities will lead to the outcomes and impacts they want to achieve. NPC have a 10-step guide on theory of change.

👉 https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/ten-steps/

Improving impact management for Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind

A case study from Investing for Good

About the project

The Mind is a charity and a network of around 130 local Minds in England and Wales. Investing for Good has been working with Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind (MSM), which relies on over 100 paid staff members and 100 volunteers to support over 6000 people each year improving their mental health and wellbeing.

Challenges

Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind delivers an impressive variety of projects to support the community, such as Ageing Better (for people 50+ feeling lonely), Peer support training (with people using their own experiences of mental health problems to help others), Open Minds therapies, Active Minds (that help people with mental health difficulties recover through sport), etc.

Such as many charities in the UK, MSM faces the challenge of having to report for each project to a different commissioner, each one having specific reporting requirements. MSM staff spend a lot of time collecting data for reporting purposes, but did not have a framework allowing them to learn from this data internally, and to take the right decisions. Moreover, MSM’s management had difficulties communicating on their impact at an organisational level, due to a lack of relevant and consistent data across projects.

MSM’s CEO and management have been very proactive in recent years in constantly trying to improve their impact measurement practices. MSM already had developed a Theory of Change and use a case management software, but MSM welcomed external support and expertise to reach best practice in impact management.

Supporting MSM in their journey from impact measurement to impact management

This project was delivered in 2018 in the context of the Impact Management Programme, funded by the Access Foundation and Power to Change, aiming at building the capacity of charities and social enterprises to manage their impact.

Given the diversity of projects and data collection practices, we started from the analysis of 4 projects, in order to design a framework that could work both at project-level and at organisational-level. We listened to project managers about their activities, expected impact, challenges, existing data collection practices. To better grasp The Mind’s impact, we organised Focus Group discussions with beneficiaries from the 4 projects.

This work allowed us to support MSM in the following:

• Formalising the impact strategy at a project level, by defining the outcomes (What changes do you want to make? When people leave the programme, where would you like them to be? What about 6 months after people have left the programme?);
• Identifying the conditions for success for each programme;
• Analysing the way the programme has been designed and give recommendations to ensure that impact is sustained on the long term;
• Designing a framework to measure progress towards each outcome, including defining the indicators, the assessment method, the data collection processes and the questionnaires;
• Training the team in impact management and ensuring they feel comfortable with the new data collection tools;
• Giving recommendations on how to move towards a digital data collection and analysis.

Although MSM is part of a nation-wide framework, local Minds have autonomy on the way they measure and report on their impact.

👉 Read the original article here.

Designing your impact report: a few key considerations

Impact reports can be a great marketing tool, a chance to update supporters on your impact, to invite them to take action, and to engage with different groups.

Readability

You will need to consider who will be reading your impact report. Often people skim information, so make key statistics stand out.

SeeAbility uses big and bold infographics to make the key impact measures they want to show, ‘impactful’.

Storytelling

What are the key pieces of information you want readers to understand or interact with? Are you trying to convey the outcomes of your work, or draw attention to the continued or changing needs.

Macmillan Cancer Support turned the narrative around in one of their impact reports, as written about by Richard Berks, which put the focus on how cancer landscape had changed, rather than just what the charity had done.

Resource

In this blog by Richard Berks, a medical research charity content writer, some great examples of reports which take into account some of these considerations are highlighted.

👉 https://richardberks.co.uk/blog/how-other-charities-do-impact-reports/

Accessibility

Similar to readability, is the wider consideration of accessibility. Creating content in multiple formats and mediums to reach multiple audiences is nothing new, but the Cornwall Museums Partnership has integrated audio recordings of its text into its annual reports to make them more accessible.

They also engage locals with playful Cornish headings.

Dementia UK, engages supporters with a video version of their impact reports, making it accessible to a broader base.

Accountability

Your charity is accountable for goals set the previous year — and updating on these builds trust and credibility with engaged supporters. Kidney Research UK outlines their goals and whether they have met them, with a helpful but short reason for why or how they may or may not have met the goal.

Also, in a simple move, leaving a library of previous years reports accessible, enables donors and supporters to see how your mission, your work or key issues have changed over time.

Standing out and reflecting your brand

Fun, playful infographics help draw attention to key points, even better if the playful style reflects the brand of your organisation, like Bookmark Reading. If your brand values are different, you can still create pages that stand out, just in your own branding, helping readers understand what you’re about through the design, narrative and transparency.

TreeAid uses bright photographs, in its impact reports as a reflection of its brand.

Ways to improve the readability of your writing

A guide by Catalyst — reproduced in part under CC.

How to write readable content, so people who use your charity’s services can get what they need from it.

“Help people on their own terms. Use words they understand, and treat them with the same level of respect you’d give them in person.” — Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee, authors of ‘Nicely Said: Writing for the Web With Style and Purpose’

You can learn to write readable content. Yes, you. Even if you don’t have ‘writer’ in your job title. And even if you’re used to more formal types of writing that use the technical language of your charity’s field — for example, reports and funding bids.

As you’ll see, writing for readability involves:

• being aware of the factors that can make text hard to read
• using the words that the people you’re writing for use
• making the effort to communicate as clearly and simply as possible

What readability is

Readability is a measure of how easy a piece of text is to read. Things that affect readability include word choice, sentence length and sentence structure.

Why readability matters

The more readable your digital content is, the easier it is for the people you support to get the information they need.

The benefits of readability

Here are the main reasons why it’s worth making your content readable.

It makes life easier for people who use your services

Readable content is:

• quicker to read
• easier to understand
• easier to remember

It’s inclusive

If your content’s readable, it helps people who have difficulty reading. This may be more people than you think, because:

• 16.4% of adults in England (7.1 million people) are functionally illiterate. This means they cannot read well enough to do everyday tasks National Literacy Trust
• around 10% of the UK population is dyslexic — British Dyslexia association
• 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning disability — Mencap
• there are over 2 million people in the UK living with sight loss — Royal National Institute for the Blind

And there may be people who use your services who find reading difficult for other reasons. They may have English as a second or third language. Or they’re distressed, which makes it harder for them to process information.

Simple ways to improve the readability of your writing include:

1. Using plain English

Plain English is sometimes called ‘clear English’ or ‘plain language. It means communication that people can understand the first time they read or hear it. Using everyday language can make content plainer English. ‘Help’ is plainer English than ‘assistance’, and ‘allow’ or ‘let’ is plainer English than ‘empower’.

GOV.UK has a list of commonly-used words to avoid and plain English alternatives. And the Plain English Campaign has an A — Z of alternative words.

Sometimes people call using clear and easily understandable content ‘dumbing down’. But that ignores its positive impact. “If you make your content easy to read, you aren’t ‘dumbing down’, you are opening up your information to anyone who wants to read it.” Sarah Winters, Content Design London.

Research shows that specialists prefer plain English. In 2012, researchers at a law school in the US carried out a study into the use of language in legal documents. It found that the more educated the person, the more they preferred plain English. So making your content readable helps people with high literacy levels too.

2. Keeping your sentences short

Long and winding sentences (like this one) are harder to follow because they can act like memory tests for people who find reading hard and that’s why the Plain English Campaign recommends using sentences that are 15–20 words long because this makes them easier to scan.

3. Avoiding words and phrases that people who use your services are not likely to understand

Do not use terms that people aren’t likely to know, and if you do, explain them. Spell out abbreviations and acronyms unless they’re very well known (like BBC or FIFA). Do not use Latin phrases (use ‘for example’ instead of ‘e.g’.). And avoid idioms (‘a piece of cake’) and metaphorical language (‘a roller coaster of emotions’). Use the everyday words that they use.

4. Using direct language

Using direct language means that it’s easy to understand who’s doing what in a sentence. Take this example from Barnardo’s:

“We support children who have been abused and help them feel safe again.”

It’s clear exactly who’s doing the supporting and helping children to feel safe.

But in the indirect, more detached and longer version below, it’s not clear who’s supporting them:

“Children who have been abused are supported and they are helped to feel safe again.”

5. Breaking up your text into easily digestible pieces using headers and bullets

Headings and bulleted lists make it easier for people to read and process your content. They divide up your content, make it easier to scan and stop it from being a wall of dense text.

6. Using readability guidelines

Content Design London’s evidence-based readability guidelines are a handy reference point. They cover everything from abbreviations to emojis.

👉 The full guide continues by looking at improving content quality and using readability checkers.

Resource

Catalyst also have a shared digital guide on using Canva to create a simple impact report.

👉 https://www.shareddigitalguides.org.uk/guides/designing-impact-report-canva

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Thanks to Impactasaurus, Investing for Good and Catalyst for their contributions to this Issue.