How to actually make more impact as a charity

Plan, do, review.

This is the dream of any good monitoring and evaluation process and the thing we all know, in theory, should happy regularly when delivering charity services. Especially when funds are tight, making services more streamlined and effective is good for everyone.

We all have good intentions around this but there are two key things that are quite often missing:

1. Good quality, reliable data

2. Easy to use reporting tools

Without these things, the review process becomes difficult and, in some cases, impossible.

So how can we actually close the loop and use what we know to improve charity services?

One way is to pay for a large scale evaluation project to take place, but what if that process could be simpler? What if decisions could be made more quickly, based on real time data that your team are motivated to collect.

Firstly, let’s talk about data.

There are two key things that make for excellent, quality data collection:

1. Easy to use data systems that make data capture a dream rather than a chore.

2. People who are motivated to collect data.

Without one of these two things, you will never have good data to work with. You can invest all the money in the world in a new system, but if your team aren’t motivated that system will quickly become defunct and full of unusable data or empty. You can also have the most willing team in the world, but without a good system in place, data collection can quickly become a chore. Let’s be honest, most people don’t work in the charity sector because they’re motivated by data collection, but it is a key part of the job, so making sure your systems are easy to use will help a lot. But a good system alone will never be enough to motivate everyone, but there is a secret tool that can help.

Easy to use reporting.

This is the key to not only reporting on your impact, but also encouraging people in their data collection too. Because when an individual can SEE the difference they are making, at a glance, data input becomes a lot more motivating. What if they could set their beneficaries, or clients, goals and then see how close they were to achieving them, in real time? They’re more likely to input that data in the first place.

Tracking goals and capturing data is made easy with Makerble

Pretty charts and dashboards

Now the team are motivated to collect that data- how do you report on it? With traditional systems you may be used to downloading it all and analysing it in Excel. What if you could have dashboards that tracked all of your progress? You can look at data in real time and realise wow, “I didn’t realise we were helping that many people.” “It’s interesting that we’ve seen a drop off in attendance recently, I wonder why that may be” and so much more.

That’s why we’re here.

Our ethos is to help you Learn, Adpat and Repeat. We want data collection to feel easy, reporting like a breeze. Not just so you can report to your funders and stakeholders (although our customisable public dashboards means you can share your stats with them instanly-no, seriously) but so you can use your data to make changes, adapt your services and therefore have a greater impact.

We’d love to chat

We’re so passionate about this and we’d love to hear more about you and the current challenges you face around this. So, if you’re interested in hearing more, you can book in a chat with one of us today.

Manage collective impact evaluations in which organisations are the Data Subject

This article outlines how to use the Makerble platform to evaluate a collective impact programme in which your evaluation focuses on organisations as the beneficiaries rather than their service users.

Each of partner in the collective impact programme would exist as a project on Makerble

Every project has a logic model composed of five stages:

• Activity outputs

• Participation outputs

• Short term outcomes

• Medium term outcomes

• Long term outcomes

You can create an Activity Output for each activity being done by the partners. 

• When progress is logged towards Activity Outputs, there is no need to tag individuals

• When progress is logged towards Participation Outputs, you can simply log the number of people who attended (a workshop for example) and if you want to, you can disaggregate that number of attendees e.g. by Age as shown in the example below.

It's fine for multiple partners to use the same Activity Outputs or for each partner to have their own set of Activity Outputs. In scenarios where they are the same, the system will aggregate the results together in an Album. You can see this on the Progress Board below. Cards 7 & 8 are the 'Album' view that aggregate the results from the three partners (called Strategic Initiative, Partner 2 and Partner 3)

For expediency, you can save a logic model as a template and apply it to multiple projects at once. (we call it a strategy)

You can engage the individuals in Participant Surveys. You can deploy these in a number of ways. The two options most suitable for an evaluation where organisations are the data subject are likely to be the Responses are Anonymous option or the Send Personalised Links via Email option.

• With Responses are anonymous a public web address is generated which anybody with the link can use to complete a survey

• With Personalised Links via Email, each individual participant receives a unique survey link that only they can use to complete the survey