Three ways to measure your impact … for free

It doesn’t matter if you’re a charity, a corporate or a business. One of the metrics of your success will be impact.

How are you helping your community/customers/audience? 

Measuring that, can be a bigger challenge for a lot of my clients than they realised.

Whether you’re the founder and totally dialled into the impact you want to have, the marketing person trying to measure results or a hand-on operations type like a sales or fundraising manager, you’re going to want to find as many ways as possible to show impact. 

There are lots of ways to do it, some of them can be pretty pricey, but if you’re struggling to do this well now (or at all), here are three ideas you can borrow from to share some impact before the end of the year. 

Google Impact Map  

When I founded Hancock Creative, if it was often REALLY hard to show really clear impact data. Why? Because we helped each client in different ways. Some raised more money, some build awareness, some increased advocacy, some recruited volunteers, some just upskilled their team. There is no one number or measure that can account for all that (or at least I never found it). 

Then one day we had a brain wave. 

 A big thing we talked about was impacted organisations in different ways around the world. So we used the free Google Map tool and created an impact map. We took a list of clients from the last year or two, tagged them with a location and shared a little story of what they do and how we were part of their journey. 

Before we knew it, we had a map we could embed on the impact page of our website and potential students or clients could skim through and read all the stories. They could also visually see at a glance how big and wide-reaching our impact was. 
 

Count the numbers 

Even if you don’t have the budget for deep-reaching research projects, there may be numbers you haven’t considered. 

One of my favourite social enterprises Who Gives a Crap have a great impact number right on their home page. They have a rolling total on their website on how much money they have overall donated.

Think, is there a way to give a financial dollar amount to your services value? At Hancock Creative I used to use a financial number to show the amount of money we had given back to the NFP sector in terms of grants and free training for causes in need. 

Another number I would use is the number of people who had registered for my free conferences around Australia. This gave people an amazing glimpse into the scope of our reach and impact as there were often 1,000+ people registered for an event. 

Stories 

If none of these work for you, it’s okay. The most hard-hitting way to share your impact is with stories. It doesn’t matter if it’s the story of a woman who did a bra fitting with you and is feeling confident in her clothes for the first time in years.  

Or if it’s a woman who was given free sanitary products from your charity and is now avoiding period poverty. 

The stories of the people you’re impacting is always your NUMBER ONE way to connect people viscerally, vulnerably to the emotion of why you do what you do. 

Hope one or more of these ideas resonated for you!