Charity guide to better impact reporting

Use data to add impact to your impact reporting

It’s important to use facts and data to prove to readers what your charity has achieved.

This type of data is known as outcome data: it provides information about changes and benefits that your activities have driven.

In particular, it can be used to answer questions about how your charity’s services are helping people, what activities achieve the most valuable results, and whether you are reaching the people who need your help most.

But outcome data is only one type of data that your charity should collect and use in an impact report. Other types of data that it is important to collect and use include:

• User data: this is information about the people you are touching, and it can be collected in a number of ways, such as through a registration or signup system when people start using your charity’s services. As well as providing answers to simple questions such as "how many people are we helping?", user data can also be used in impact reports to show who you are reaching and whether you are reaching your intended audiences
  
  
• Engagement data: this data can help readers of your impact report understand how people use your service, how often and how long they use it, and whether some groups of people engage more than others

• Feedback data: this is important because it can help establish what the people you are helping really think of the services they use. It’s easy to say that your charity is helping people but using feedback data to show that those people say that they are being helped effectively and their needs are being met is much more credible and impactful. Feedback data can also be very useful in helping you understand which parts of your charity’s services are working well and which are less effective
  
  

Think about how you use and present your data

Pure data is generally very dull, so it is important that you present it in your impact report in appropriate ways to engage the reader.

And as there are likely to be many different types of reader, you will likely need to present the data in many different ways. For example, if you want to use data to inspire people to volunteer for your charity, then you might want to present it in an easily accessible way such as a pie chart or infographic. But that type of approach may not be suitable to provide accountability or transparency, or to show how data has driven particular actions and initiatives.

It’s also important that all the data that your charity collects - including existing data in a CRM system, for example - is easily accessible so that it is available for use in an impact report.

It may be necessary to break down some data silos to ensure that all the data that is needed is easily available.

Connect with your supporters

The final thing to remember in an impact report is that most donors do not distribute their charitable giving to organisations based on an understanding of real need. Instead they donate because a particular cause has touched them, or perhaps because of an emotional connection to some of the people that a particular charity seeks to help.

So provide a message in your impact report that resonates with the reader: when you make their heart sing, you are giving them a reason to become a supporter of your charity.