Understand Impact Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define impact and outcomes.
- Use key terms to discuss impact management.
- Understand key skills in impact management.
Grow Your Impact
If you’re working for the social good, it’s the impact you have on your mission that matters.
If you think of your mission as your goal for the world, impact is the meaningful, long-term change you’re making. Impact is the result of regularly achieving your desired outcomes, the measurable changes expected for participants or stakeholders as a result of your work. For example, if your mission is to end hunger, you can achieve that impact by regularly producing outcomes that help participants access and prepare healthy meals.
In this Quick Look, you learn about impact management, a set of skills and practices used to evaluate, manage, and improve your organization’s impact. Impact management is more than believing you’re doing good in the world—it’s measuring your outcomes, looking for evidence, and making decisions based on what you find. Any social impact organization, regardless of mission or resources, can apply these principles and practices to work more effectively.
Let’s start with a few key terms and concepts in impact management.
Understand Key Terms in Impact Management
Impact management is all about cause and effect—or activities and outcomes.
An activity is the work you do, like the programs and benefits you offer, that produces an outcome, which we defined earlier. For example, imagine an organization that provides nutritional counseling (the activity) to increase food security (the outcome).
To measure the effects of your work, you use indicators to show what happened after the activity. There are two levels of indicators.
- Program indicators—also called outputs—measure progress within a program or activity, such as the percentage of people who enroll in and complete a nutrition counseling program.
- Outcome indicators measure progress toward your desired results, such as improved health of the people you serve. Outcome indicators are often harder to measure than outputs, but provide consistency and focus for your work.
Inputs represent required resources for an activity, such as budget, staff time, facilities, legislation, and in-kind donations. Inputs help you measure and compare the effectiveness of different activities. For example, imagine that two activities produce the same outcome, but one requires more inputs. You can do more of the less expensive but equally effective activity.
All of these elements flow together from one to the next to create the impact you’re working toward.
[alt text: Inputs go into activities to generate outputs and outcomes, which lead to impact.]
Your starting point for impact management work is often a hypothesis of how and why inputs and activities produce outcomes. That hypothesis is sometimes called a theory of change or logic model. The theory of change identifies the problem you’re trying to solve or improve, sets target outcomes, and maps your path to reach the desired impact. And it informs your learning agenda, a set of questions that guide your organization to select indicators and collect evidence of outcomes.
Both your theory of change and learning agenda are components of your strategic evidence plan. The plan is a roadmap for your organization’s investments and activities in continuous evidence-building and program improvement. You create the plan by carefully considering why you’re building evidence, what activities to prioritize, and what’s necessary to implement those activities.
To make your strategic evidence plan actionable, use Outcome Management. With Outcome Management, you can get started quickly, set your outcome strategy, and collect indicator data—all in Salesforce.
Assess Your Impact Management Skills
We make it sound simple here, but impact management is a process that requires dedication, time, and practice to do well and see results. To get started, think about how your organization performs in the following key skills, which are crucial for impact management success.
- Make impact core to your organizational strategy and prioritize evidence-gathering.
- Build evidence continuously through performance management, program development, program improvement, and impact measurement focused on key questions. Outcome Management, mentioned in the note, helps you collect evidence in Salesforce.
- Integrate your impact and financial management. Review outcomes and activities from a financial management perspective to make more informed decisions about how to use your resources.
- Practice participant-centered program management and prioritize who or what you serve when you design and manage programs.
- Consider data and evidence as part of every decision with a focus on how activities, inputs, and outcomes relate.
You’ve barely scratched the surface of impact management here. Check out the Impact Management Tactics and Practices module to learn more.