Maximise Your Impact: A Guide

This guide is written for people (primarily social entrepreneurs but it also applies much more widely) who want to maximise their positive impact and want a practical approach to help them do that. The key to this approach is ‘Impact Thinking’ and at its heart this means involving and being accountable to stakeholders, primarily those that you aim to support. It is about collecting data from stakeholders to improve the design of products or services aimed at addressing a particular social issue. We hope that users of this guide will focus on producing recommendations: to change, stop or scale their activities. However this groundwork will also make it easier to report your impact to funders and to let them know how you are using data to inform change.

Find it on the Social Value UK website here: http://www.socialvalueuk.org/maximise-impact-guide-social-entrepreneurs/

It is built around the 10 Impact Questions and the Plan / Do / Assess / Review approach:

1. what problem are we trying to solve?
2. what is our proposed solution to the problem?
3. who experiences changes in their lives as result of what you do?
4. what changes are (or likely to be) experienced?
5. how can we measure these changes?
6. how much of each change has happened (or is likely to happen)?
7. how much of each change is caused by our activities?
8. how long do we need to measure the changes for?
9. what is the relative importance of the different changes?
10. which changes matter and are important enough for us to manage?

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Supporting you to manage your impact

The Impact Management Programme aims to build the capacity of charities and social enterprises to manage their impact. This programme is co-designed by the sector and underpinned by learning and collaboration, providing support to analyse and respond to the data collected – using it to change and improve programmes and services.

http://accessimpact.org/

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Impact practice made simple

A web page offering tools and insight into managing how to make the most of your impact.

https://www.inspiringimpact.org/