Developing your impact measurement framework

This article builds on the results flow article. If you haven’t read that yet, we recommend you do so before continuing.

Measuring and Managing Your Impact

Gauging success in a traditional, profit-centric business can be done easily using established and readily understood financial measures. Impact performance is more difficult to identify and quantify. How do you track changes in attitude, knowledge, and behaviour? Collecting and assessing this data requires a structured approach. You need an impact measurement framework (IMF)!

An IMF puts your results flow theory to the test. It answers the questions: How achievable are our outcomes? Does our timeline make sense? Are our strategies working? And lets you adjust your activities as you go to focus on what gets you closer to your goals.

It’s also a really handy resource for developing your business plan, setting your roadmap, and determining more challenging future targets.

We’ve previously covered setting goals, defining impact, and creating a results flow, and now we are learning how to make a plan to achieve our desired outcomes and measure our progress toward them. We are layering tools on top of each other to create a framework for turning our dreams into measurable impact.

Together, these tools will make it possible and easier for you to:

  • Pitch for social finance (and traditional) investment
  • Align your activities with your goals

We will walk you through the elements of an IMF, dig into how to create and evaluate indicators and get you started on designing a custom framework in this article. Let’s get to it!