Assess Key Skills for Impact Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand key skills needed for impact management.
- Assess your organization’s readiness for impact management.
Skills for Impact Management
Remember that impact management is both a process and a practice. This means that your team builds its skills as you progress.
Five key skills help your organization grow with impact management:
- Impact as core to strategy
- Continuous evidence building
- Integrated financial management
- Participant-centered program management
- Evidence-based decision-making
In this unit, you examine each skill and how it helps your organization’s impact-management journey.
Impact as Core to Strategy
Putting impact at the core of your strategy means that you emphasize impact in every part of your organizational strategy and management. In practice, this skill involves integrating your mission into everything you do—and not just in your programs, but with your hiring, financing, and other tasks.
For example, an organization with impact at the core of its strategy cuts programs that aren’t producing results and publicly shares that decision. It decides on staffing based on impact. It optimizes its technology for impact, too. Every decision is made with a goal of increasing impact.
Continuous Evidence Building
Remember that impact management includes a long-term commitment to ongoing data collection. Continuous evidence building starts with many of the foundational documents in the strategic evidence plan you learned about earlier. Complete those steps to ensure you have the tools to continuously collect and analyze impact data—rather than doing so at singular moments.
In practice, organizations dedicated to continuous evidence building monitor their performance, improve programs, and work from consistent definitions of their outputs and outcomes. A system that helps you collect outcome data and store it in a way that connects with activity data—like Outcome Management in Salesforce—helps make data collection part of your regular processes.
Continuous evidence building is a significant topic at the core of impact management. You learn more in the next unit.
Integrated Financial Management
Review outcomes and activities from a financial-management perspective to make informed trade-offs about how to use your resources.
An organization with an impact-management focus considers the implications of decisions that go beyond the budget, such as effects on participant experiences. For example, they may divert money from a low-impact program to a high-impact program to better invest resources.
As you grow in this skill, you’ll integrate outcomes and possibly impact with financial management. Practices to tie financial management to impact are emerging through organizations like the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts. See the link in Resources to learn more.
Participant-Centered Program Management
Participant-centered program management prioritizes an organization’s accountability to the people and communities it serves.
Organizations best employ participant-centered program management when they make decisions based on feedback from program participants. This data is key to determining how well services are delivered. What you read about respectful data collection earlier in the module applies here too.
To collect output data in the same system you use for outcomes data, use Outcome Management as part of Nonprofit Cloud. Nonprofit Cloud helps nonprofit organizations define, plan, deliver, and track programs and the benefits they provide—while connecting the dots to help you make real-time decisions about how to improve your work.
Evidence-Based Decision-Making
Every skill covered in this unit contributes to evidence-based decision-making. Organizations practicing this skill base all their decisions on good data, including outputs, outcomes, financial measurements, feedback from participants, and more.
Organizations without an impact-management strategy could trust managers to make reasonable decisions or go with their gut. But, organizations can make better decisions and improve outcomes using evidence based on real data. Outcome Management and Nonprofit Cloud for Programs give you data for decision-making, which you can use to create reports and dashboards for presenting real-time data.
How can your organization build its evidence-based decision-making skills? It starts with the data you have for evaluation.
In the next unit, you learn how to build a culture of continuous evidence building.