In an era where a positive impact becomes increasingly important and sought after by both consumers and society as a whole, creating a lasting impact is not just an aspiration; it's a strategic imperative. The journey to real, meaningful change starts with a well-structured social impact strategy.
In this blog post, we will walk you through the five crucial steps to building a potent strategy that drives social change and resonates deeply with your stakeholders, investors and society at large.
You likely already know your purpose and goals, but nevertheless it’s paramount that you write it down, so it can become embedded in your organisation - from top to bottom.
The foundation of any impactful strategy begins with a clear sense of purpose and well-defined goals. Start by pinpointing the change you wish to see in society and the specific outcomes you intend to achieve, and for whom. It’s important to be realistic and to consciously deselect target audiences, goals etc., in order to focus your organisation’s intervention or impact work.
Your purpose acts as a lighthouse, guiding your efforts, while your goals serve as the milestones on your transformative journey.
Once you have your organisation’s purpose and goals set up, you need to translate it into a coherent theory of change. Think of the purpose and goals as a lighthouse, you need to reach. But to reach it you need a proper boat that can take you from A to B - a theory of change.
In the Theory of Change, you outline the sequence of events that will lead to your desired social outcomes. Break down the cause-and-effect relationships between your activities, outputs, intended outcomes, and the broader societal impact.
At Impactly, we use the logic framework. It serves as an organisation’s roadmap, guiding your actions and enlightening stakeholders. The use of the logic model is not necessarily difficult, but it takes some iterations - but don’t worry, it’s worth your time. Because if done right, it allows you to easily set up the correct metrics, so your impact measuring becomes easier, and your impact reporting stronger.
Start by writing down your intended input, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact.
Read more on how to create your Theory of Change
If you need help creating a theory of change for your intervention or organisation, you can participate in our Impact Workshop that we host alongside Economists Without Borders.
Read more and sign up for an Impact Workshop
You now have a lighthouse, you have your boat, but you need a compass to tell you the directions and to be able to tell others where your lighthouse is when you reach it.
The data strategy is your compass, guiding you towards your intended impact goal. Selecting the right data metrics to measure, will allow the data strategy to illuminate the path from actions to insights.
Here are the six steps we use at Impactly when we help organisations set up a data strategy:
Read more about how to set up a data strategy
With your theory of change charted, you can now shift your focus to crafting actionable strategies and activities. These are the tangible steps that bridge theory with reality.
Start by dividing your goals into manageable tasks, each contributing to the larger mission.
You should consider:
Ensure that each activity aligns seamlessly with your theory of change.
Having an effective social impact strategy requires continuous vigilance and adaptation.
With your data strategy in hand, you’ll be able to collect the correct data regularly which will allow you to measure your impact on-going. You now need to set up a way of managing your impact in an easy and effective way to ensure that you don’t miss important data points or spend too much time in various spreadsheets and survey clients.
If you want our advice, you should use Impactly, but it’s of course up to you ;)
With the right setup to collect and display data, you can easily assess the progress of your activities against your theory of change regularly. This will ensure that you meet your organisation’s goals - and if not, adjust your intervention where/if possible.
By being able to adjust the interventions, you’ll also be able to maximize your impact, as you can address challenges and opportunities early on.
Lastly, you need to tell the world about your social impact. This means reporting your impact to stakeholders and potential investors, showcasing it on social media, doing PR outreach, or communicating it internally in your organisation.
Here, it’s important to think about which parts of your intervention’s results are important to highlight to whom. Stakeholders might emphasize other aspects than potential impact investors or the news media.
At Impactly, we offer a report feature, where you can easily create multiple reports for each intervention, making it easy to cater to target audiences’ needs. We also offer an easy drag-and-drop styling which makes it easy and fast to create reports, while allowing you to write text, insert pictures and much more. All to make impact reporting easier than ever.
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