Your Business’s Impact: How To Measure It And Why You Need To Do This
I’m Rachel Dunford, a multi award-winning impact specialist. I help organisations measure the impact of their work. I’m passionate about helping inspirational and exciting organisations make a positive difference to the lives of the people they work with, and I do this by teaching my clients to capture, measure and articulate their impact before showcasing it in the most powerful ways.
What is impact?
Impact is more than counting numbers. It is about measuring the difference you make. The impression you leave. And the value you create.
It feels relatively straight forward to tally up things like the number of clients you’ve supported in a year, the volume of seminars you’ve delivered, or how many new brands you’ve created.
But to be able to know the difference that your work had… that feels harder, doesn’t it?
Did your work result in a change in other people’s behaviour, attitude, or knowledge?
Did your support empower your clients? Did it boost their reputation, their confidence, or their self-belief?
Or did you enable your customers to attract more business, to increase their turnover or to apply for new funding?
Maybe your services enabled your client to solve a problem, or to overcome a challenge or to break down a barrier?
You can probably answer yes to some, if not all of these questions.
But do you know how to capture these things? Most of them feel pretty intangible and fairly nebulous, and just not the sorts of things that you can measure.
But you can measure them! These are all examples of business impact – the sorts of things that I measure for my clients, using qualitative and quantitative research techniques.
But why should you bother with an assessment of a business in terms of its impact?
Why impact is important and what can you do with it.
Whether you’re a counsellor, an accountant, a brand designer, a charity or an educator, you need to understand the impact that you have on your clients or stakeholders.
Knowing the impact of your business is vital for many reasons… here are just a few:
It gives you the confidence that you are serving your clients and stakeholders in the best way possible, responding to their needs and solving their problems successfully.
It empowers you to refine, improve and tailor your services and to focus on the aspects of your business that deliver the biggest impact and to stop doing the things that are less effective.
It lets you capture the difference you are making to the lives of the people you support.
It gives you social proof that what you do works, and it gives you integrity – even more so if someone outside of your business has taken the time to measure your impact independently.
It gives you the evidence you need to support expanding your offer, applying for funding, or winning new business.
Armed with this knowledge, you can move mountains.
Five top tips to get started with knowing your impact
If you want to know what your impact is, follow these tips to get started:
1. Understand that measuring impact is more than counting numbers
Impact is the difference you make, the impression you leave and the value you create. Your impact could be a change in attitude, the acquisition of new skills, an increase in confidence, the breaking down of barriers, the creation of new opportunities and so much more.
2. Be clear about what it is that you want to achieve
So, what is it that you do for your clients or stakeholders? What do you want them to do as a result of your help? How do you want them to feel? What will change for them? THIS will be your impact.
3. Capture a baseline
To confidently measure the impact that you have had on your clients, you need to know where they started out. So, before you dive head-first into delivering anything, be careful to record where they begin on their journey with you, because where they end up and how they got there will be where your impact lies.
4. Know what success would look like
How will you know if you have successfully delivered the impact you hope to? What are the things you will need to look out for – the data you will need to collect – to prove that you’ve created a change? Figuring this out will allow you to develop the tools you need (surveys, interviews, case studies etc) to capture the evidence of your impact.
5. Celebrate your impact!
And once you’ve gathered your evidence – make sure you do something positive with it! Talk about it on your social media. Write articles about it. Weave it into your marketing. Add it into your pitches, or your grant applications.
Show the world the difference you make!
Get help with knowing your impact…
And if you’d like more help with capturing and measuring your impact, you can find me here:
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