Welcome once again to our Impact Management Blog series. So far, we have covered: What is Impact Management? Why is it important to nonprofits? And what are its major attributes? If you haven’t checked out our previous blog, we recommend you have a read first.
It’s time now to move into the adoption stage and learn the basics of Impact Management adoption for your organization.
How can my organization adopt Impact Management?
Strategic Evidence Plan
Now that we know why and how important Impact Management is to your organization, we will introduce you to the four components of Impact Management that will help you get started on your journey. These are essential to measure impact and devise a strategy for upcoming activities. Strategic evidence planning helps organizations to leverage evidences to the fullest for making significant decisions.
Theory of Change: The Theory of Change is the first step towards Strategic Evidence Planning which helps you understand and agree on why and how changes will take place in the organization. It is a step-by-step process that involves addressing problems, giving inputs, predicting outcomes, and analyzing the benefits.
Learning Agenda: The Learning Agenda is the process of learning about and acknowledging the key questions facing an organization and what methodologies are available to answer them. It targets questions like the effectiveness of the programs, setting goals, timelines, etc.
Data collection: The Data Collection Plan assists you in identifying the metrics about the organization, donors, campaigns, goals, and finance. It also deals with how the data will be collected and analyzed.
Technology Plan: The Technology Plan lays out all the prominent technologies and tools that the organization can use to analyze, visualize, collect, and report its data.
Once your team is able to create a road map for your campaign and initiate a comprehensive evidence-building process, the next step is getting familiar with the goal of your programs and the tools they have to achieve those goals. It is crucial for your users to understand the needs of beneficiaries and the extent to which your program can address them using different tools and repost that are present in their dashboards.
Program Inventory and Map
Organizations need to deeply understand and have absolute clarity on what programs they are offering, who receives those programs, and how they are received. Nonprofits must identify gaps in their programming and delivery as mapped against community needs and take corrective action. A conspicuous benefit would be greater and more targeted allocation of resources.
Impact Dashboard
A platform dashboard is an excellent tool for nonprofits to obtain a unified view of the performance of their programs and the outcomes. It helps them better understand how the programs are impacting the beneficiaries and what their experiences are. Additionally, organization reports provide useful Impact KPIs which helps them manage such things as cost-per-outcome and other finance indicators.
Impact Management is a well-planned series of protocols and practices that can monitor and manage your nonprofit organization’s goals. It helps you be the best at what you do by prioritizing goals, enhancing the results at every level of program management, and providing evaluation and impact measurement while aligning your team with the strategy.
Liked what you read? Please download the complete eBook here.
Want to learn about the Salesforce.org and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud tools you need to support you on your Impact Management journey? Stay tuned for part three!
