Measuring impact is a key part of philanthropy. As well as helping to celebrate successes, evaluating progress may reveal places in which your and your recipients’ efforts are falling short of their desired outcomes.
Identifying these can allow you to shift your focus, adapt your approach and may ultimately improve your impact.
The topic of impact measurement is vast. Here, we briefly outline the key perspectives and steps you could take to evaluate progress, and share some good practice principles.
Three perspectives on impact
One of the key challenges is that ‘impact’ means different things to different people. There are also different aspects to impact in philanthropy – from societal, to organisational, to more personal.
As a starting point, it is helpful to think of impact as the change that a philanthropist aspires to make through their giving. In essence, it is the difference that a contribution makes above and beyond any changes that would have otherwise occurred.
For example, these might include improved health or life chances for a group of people, or increased biodiversity. These are usually the kind of improvements philanthropists mean when using the term ‘impact’.
However, you could also view impact from three possible angles:
1. Through your recipients
This involves assessing how your recipients define and measure their impact on society, and the extent to which they are applying and learning lessons. You can glean this information via formal and informal conversations, site visits, peer reviews and reports.
2. As a donor
Taking this approach involves assessing whether, and how, your own contributions are making their intended impact. As a donor, this requires a different way of thinking, as you may be one step removed from the frontline of social change. Some donors see their role simply to respond to and support great charities and community organisations; others may consider impact more in terms of their contribution to a particular cause or issue. A Theory of Change (see below) can help to establish a framework for measurement.
3. Personal aspiration
Another possibility is to consider whether your personal hopes and aspirations (for you and for your family) are being realised through your giving.
All three perspectives on impact are relevant, and exploring what matters most to you can be worthwhile.
Some donors choose to measure impact themselves, but many seek expert support. There are external consultants and advisers who can help, and this could have the added benefit of reducing potential bias.
Key principles for measuring impact
Whether you’re evaluating your own progress or working with an external expert, following the eight practices below can be useful.
- Work alongside your grantees to identify what ‘meaningful progress’ is.
- Consider funding grantees to undertake meaningful measurement (often a gap in investment for charities).
- Only measure what is most relevant and use your insights to learn and adapt.
- Be clear about the distinction between your/others’ contributions to positive change.
- Consider whether the change(s) may have occurred without your intervention.
- Recognise that societal impact and change takes time, and the process is rarely linear.
- Consider your personal hopes and aspirations – have you communicated these (as an individual, collective or family) and are they being met?
- Look at how others in your chosen field measure their impact and progress. What can you learn from this?
Attribution or contribution?
When measuring impact, we are looking for a causal link between our actions (or those of the organisations we support) and the ultimate change that happened as a result. In some cases, organisations can rigorously measure their attributed impact – for example, through randomised control trials, which is often seen as the ‘gold standard’ in measurement.
However, in the work of philanthropy and social change, success is often the result of collective action.
So, what does this mean for measuring impact?
On the one hand, establishing the link between actions, outcome and impact can give us confidence that we are on the right path and that resources were put to good use. However, focusing too narrowly on trying to attribute impact to one actor brings its own set of problems. As multiple factors usually contribute to an outcome, it's often difficult to pinpoint which of these played the greatest role.
A more helpful concept may be ‘contribution’. Rather than owning the impact, the mindset shifts to being part of the winning team. If you have a clear sense of where you are trying to get to together, you can still measure whether you get there and your progress towards that goal. However, you can also keep a more open attitude about whether you (or the organisations you support) were the sole owners of those changes.
The Theory of Change
Some philanthropists use a Theory of Change to map and visualise their giving. This approach clearly sets out the individual steps that you need to take to achieve your goals, in turn creating a logical model that shows how change could happen. A logic model can be particularly helpful if you wish to be accountable to others, build partnerships or seek funding for your work.
A Theory of Change usually asks the following questions:
- What change will you seek?
- What is the need for the change?
- Who will you target through your philanthropy and where?
- How will you and others make the change happen?
- When will you achieve this change?
- What are your underlying assumptions?
If you would like to learn more about developing a Theory of Change and view some examples, there are numerous resources and guides available, including (but not limited to) those provided by think tank New Philanthropy Capital.
