Making an Impact with your Heritage Organisation

Learn how and why impact reporting has become so important to those working in the third sector, and how you can bring your work to life through impact measurement.

Creating impact has become a buzz world in the world of nonprofits in the last few years. But exactly does it mean and how can you show that your organisation is creating impact?

Impact reports have set the standard for the way in which organisations demonstrate the short and long term effectiveness of their work, usually shared with funders but they’re also great for communicating with interested customers too. After all what’s the point in putting all of that effort into launching a new product or service and not following up on its effectiveness?

Organisations are learning about the benefits of impact reporting for their organisation.

Whether your mission is to reach new audiences or to increase sales, you will already have a goal in mind, which is perfect as these goals go hand in hand with monitoring your impact. Impact evaluation should run through the core of everything you do. If your goal is to reach new audiences you will already have in mind - How will you reach them? Who will you reach? And how many of them do you hope to target? These details are exactly what you need to monitor and track, in order to prove you are achieving the goals set out.

We’d describe this type of data as short term, but how would you go about measuring long term impact? As it’s long term you’ll want to create even bigger impact and perhaps influence a change in behaviours or values. Reducing waste or assisting more people into independent living are good examples of this.

Exploring the importance of keeping track of your data and impact.

Surveys, focus groups and interviews are all great ways to capture this information. You’ll need to monitor your data for a longer timeframe and engage firsthand with people, but the impact you’ll be able to demonstrate from your work will have even more weight behind it and hopefully will help to attract more funders to your cause!

Even if you don’t work directly with funders or sponsors, it’s worth getting into the habit of measuring your impact as this information can be used for a wealth of benefits internally within your organisation, as well as being useful information for customers. If you have reduced the amount of waste within your company, why not shout about it? If 90% of your clients go on to find employment after working with you, why not share this?

At Past Futures we have over eight years experience of working with organisations, measuring and showcasing the great impact they have achieved. Laying out our work with the use of a Theory of Change and Logic Model, we know how to implement simple monitoring systems that anyone would be able to utilise.

Find out more about our consulting services and how we can help you to evaluate and share your work with the world https://www.pastfutures.co.uk/consultancy