The Six Impact Maxims

Over the years I’ve worked with more than a hundred charities of all shapes and sizes. One thing that has always stood out to me is how hard people work – often with limited time, stretched resources, and competing demands – to try and make the biggest difference they can.

Along the way, I’ve noticed certain themes coming up again and again. Principles that, when applied, really help organisations focus, measure, and grow their impact. I started calling these Impact Maxims – short, memorable statements that capture a lesson worth holding onto.

To share them more widely, I’ve created a short video series. Each week I’ll be releasing a new two-minute video introducing one of the maxims. They’re deliberately short, sharp, and practical: something you can watch over a cup of tea and (hopefully) take straight into your own work.

The six maxims together form a toolkit for approaching impact in a way that is:

• Practical – easy to put into action, even with limited time.

• Memorable – expressed simply so they stick in your mind.

• Flexible – relevant across different services, contexts, and challenges.

My hope is that these maxims leave you better prepared and resourced to make meaningful, effective changes — not only to the services you deliver, but also to how you capture and report on your impact.

👉 If you’d like to access all six videos right away, just complete the form below. You’ll get the full series instantly, without waiting for the weekly releases.

Turning Complexity into Clarity

When an organisation has already gathered mountains of feedback, ideas, and evaluation reports, the hardest part of creating a new strategy is often knowing what not to include.

That’s where we began in our recent work with Connected Voice.

Connected Voice is what’s known in the third sector as a Local Infrastructure Organisation (LIO). They play a critical role in Newcastle and Gateshead, supporting the voluntary sector to thrive, and strategically engaging with public and commercial partners to make that happen.

When we joined the process, they had already done a lot of listening — to board members, staff, and members, and through project evaluations. The challenge was making sense of it all, spotting the common threads, and separating the strategic from the tactical.

We began by mapping the big themes and testing them with the team. Then we facilitated live workshops with staff and members, plus online focus groups with other stakeholders — particularly other charities who are members of Connected Voice. The energy and commitment people brought to these sessions was impressive, with participants leaning into the process and taking it seriously.

From there, we worked closely with the Chief Executive and nominated board members to refine the draft plan, iterating until it felt clear, focused, and ready to launch.

The new strategic plan will be unveiled this autumn. It’s designed to steer Connected Voice through the choppy waters facing the sector, while giving them the clarity and confidence to seize key opportunities ahead.

For us at Goodlabs, this was strategy development at its best: turning complexity into clarity, keeping the focus on what really matters, and building ownership across the organisation.

If your charity is ready for a strategic plan that cuts through the noise and sets a clear course for the future, we’d love to help.

A Powerful CRM For A Mighty Charity

The Kennedy Street mission

Small but Mighty: Implementing Salesforce for Kennedy Street Recovery

We’ve loved working with the team at Kennedy Street Recovery down in Brighton — a community-led charity doing incredible things to support people in recovery from addiction.

While they might be small in terms of staff headcount, but they really are mighty when it comes to impact. Kennedy Street is all about lived experience, peer support, volunteering, and building real community — and you can feel that energy in everything they do. From their peer-led recovery workshops to their daily Recovery Café, they’re creating spaces where people feel safe, supported, and seen. It's all about practical help, emotional connection, and hope — and it’s working. Lives are being rebuilt every day.

When they first came to us, Kennedy Street were using an old custom-built database that was no longer fit for purpose. To keep things ticking over, they were relying heavily on spreadsheets — which was far from ideal as a means of tracking complex journeys of change.

That’s where Cimplify came in — our Salesforce-based impact management system designed especially for charities. We worked closely with Mark and the team to customise the core application around their operating model — to deliver a solution that reflects the way they work and supports the brilliant things they’re already doing.

As Mark puts it:

"Working with Matt and Abi at Goodlabs to build, configure and implement our new Cimplify CRM has been a great experience. The attention to detail and consideration of the needs and nuances of our charity has been second to none. They coached us through the whole process from set up to training, and the support has meant that we are now really confident moving forward with using the system. I also know that if we get stuck they will be there to help, which is very reassuring. Cimplify itself is really intuitive and our team started using it on day one. I would definitely recommend Goodlabs and Cimplify."

Thank you, Mark! That means a lot.

It’s been a real pleasure to work alongside such a passionate and values-driven team. We’re looking forward to continue to support Kennedy Street in the years ahead.

The Impact of Volunteering

It was a really busy start to 2025 here at Goodlabs. Since January we were deeply involved in delivering a significant evaluation project on behalf of several voluntary sector organisations across the Tyneside area.

Commissioned by the North East Combined Authority, this ambitious evaluation centred around the £1 million UKSPF Volunteering & Social Action Project, a regional initiative designed to expand volunteer participation, enhance community engagement, and strengthen local voluntary organisations.

Working with seven major VCSE organisations (including Connected Voice, Volunteering Matters, VODA, Community Action Northumberland, Blyth Valley CVA, Northumberland CVA, and The Key), we aimed to capture the wide-ranging impacts volunteering has in the region. Our task involved getting to grips with a large volume of data and evidence gathered over 18 months of project delivery, plus putting out our own surveys, running focus groups and holding lots of structured interviews. All of this then required extensive analysis from which we could draw conclusions and make recommendations.

One particularly important focus was on Supported Volunteering Pathways—programmes that guide people facing barriers to employment towards meaningful volunteer opportunities. Our findings reaffirmed that volunteering serves as a powerful vehicle for personal growth, increased employability, and social inclusion, positively influencing both individuals and their communities.

The evaluation has highlighted volunteering as not simply as an act of one-way altruism but as an exchange of mutual benefits. Volunteers gain new skills, confidence, and social connections, while voluntary organisations build capacity and resilience, in order to make a larger and more enduring community impact.

We’re proud that our evaluation and recommendations will contribute to improved collaboration and strategic learning within the sector. Significantly, we hope our recommendations will inform and enhance future funding frameworks, creating sustainable, equitable financial structures between the Combined Authority and voluntary sector organisations in the region.

All in all the project has been really rewarding and provides a great showcase of Goodlabs’ skills in evaluation, strategic analysis, and collaborative working within the voluntary sector. We're optimistic that the insights provided through our work will pave the way for strengthened community action, better supported volunteering pathways, and enduring social and economic contributions across Tyneside and beyond.

Cimplify on-the-go!

Salesforce App – Stay Connected Wherever You Work

Did you know that you can also access Cimplify on the go via the Salesforce app which is available from the Apple App store and Google Play store.

Accessing Cimplify via the Salesforce mobile app empowers your team to manage beneficiary interactions effortlessly on the go, ensuring important updates and insights are always at your fingertips. With mobile accessibility, your charity can look up and record activities away from the desk—making your CRM system more flexible, responsive, and aligned with the realities of frontline charity work. The mobile app is ideal for youth groups, outreach services, or support meetings at community venues, you can:

• Record Data Instantly: Take registers of group attendance or log client interactions in real-time.

• Boost Productivity: Eliminate paperwork delays by entering and updating your data on-the-go.

• Easy to Use: Intuitive design ensures even non-technical users feel comfortable and confident.

• Secure and Reliable: Benefit from Salesforce's robust security while accessing Cimplify remotely.

The app is now available for free to all users with either full or platform licences.

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Portal Access for Volunteers and Sessional Team

Do you involve volunteers or sessional workers in your charity's daily activities? Often, organisations want these valuable team members to complete simple yet important tasks—like logging attendance at support groups or recording mentoring sessions—without giving them full access to the entire CRM system.

Cimplify's new portal offers an effective solution:

• Secure Individual Logins: Each volunteer receives their own secure login, managed easily by your admin.

• Tailored Access: Volunteers only see the data relevant to their role—perfect for a volunteer group leader who interacts with specific beneficiaries.

• Cost-Effective Pricing: From just £1/user/month.

• Mobile Responsive: Access the portal smoothly from any device, anywhere.

Set-up is straightforward with affordable one-off fees, making it easy to expand secure access to your wider team without stretching your budget.

Interested in seeing how a portal could benefit your team? Send us an email to find out more.

Impact Masterclass in Newcastle

Making Impact Count: Highlights from Our Charity Impact Masterclass

This month, we were delighted to deliver a Charity Impact Masterclass in partnership with RBC Brewin Dolphin at their Newcastle offices. The event, hosted by Charity Investment Manager Jeffrey Ball, brought together charity leaders from across the region for a practical, energising session on how to better understand, evidence and maximise the difference they make.

It was brilliant to see the room full of people so engaged in this vital conversation. At the heart of it all was a simple but powerful question: how do we really know we’re making an impact?

Our founder, Matt Wilson, opened the session by sharing a series of ‘impact maxims’—practical principles drawn from over 20 years of working alongside charities. These are the kind of reminders that help teams stay focused on what matters most, even when things are busy. One that struck a chord with many attendees was:

“Outputs tell us how busy we are but outcomes tell us how effective we are.”
– Matt Wilson, Goodlabs

It’s a simple but game-changing mindset shift that keeps impact front and centre from day one.

Next, our CRM expert, Abi Green, took the baton to lead a hands-on session exploring the data side of the impact puzzle. She shared best practices for capturing and analysing meaningful data—without making it a burden—and showed how our charity CRM, Cimplify, can help track the full beneficiary journey. It’s all about turning data into insight, and insight into action.

One attendee summed it up perfectly:

“All too often impact reporting just includes the data, but it’s the ‘so what?’ that matters.”

Exactly that.

A huge thank you to Jeffrey and the team at RBC Brewin Dolphin for hosting us, and to everyone who attended and contributed so thoughtfully to the discussion. It was great to pass on some practical tips, renewed clarity, and fresh inspiration to demonstrate the powerful work the region’s charities are doing.

Celebrating 800 years!

Goodlabs is proud to have become a Gold Sponsor of North Shields 800.

Whilst we have customers all across England and Wales we’re really proud of our roots in Tyneside. So much so that when the opportunity came up to become a sponsor of our town’s 800th birthday we just had to join in.

The North Shields 800 initiative marks the origins of the town on the banks of the river way back in 1225AD. But it isn’t just about history - the project celebrates the past, present and future of the town.

Find out more on the North Shields 800 website and see if there are any events that take your fancy.

North Shields’ historic Fish Quay with the ‘Low Light’ building standing at the edge of the harbour.

Cricket for Good

Making cricket accessible to people with disabilities

Having completed some really interesting projects with sports organisations focused around Football, Rugby and Skateboarding we’ve now begun a really exciting piece of work with Durham Cricket Foundation.

The top flight club, based at the incredible Riverside ground in Chester-le-Street has big ambitions for the future. Responding to new initiatives by the English Cricket Board the DCF is keen to grow its community programmes in terms of reach and impact. Goodlabs have been appointed to support the board and leadership team through the process of formulating a new strategy, rooted in insightful stakeholder consultation.

In addition we’ll help the Foundation to analyse and interpret data from their wide range of community activities in order to produce a new Impact Report to be published alongside the new strategic plan in 2025. There’s so much going on all across the age spectrum and all around the region. We’ve already been pleased to see a really strong inclusion agenda through which cricket is opening up all sorts of connected opportunities for groups of people who often feel left out.

To find out more about the Durham Cricket Foundation click here.

The Value of Cultural Education

We’ve been pleased to support the Northumberland Cultural Education Partnership through 2023 and 2024 with an evolving portfolio of work to evaluate its delivery work and explore its role and priorities going forward.

One of the most interesting strands of the work was to produce an external evaluation of a very interesting project involving hundreds of young people across a number of schools in the county. Whenever we undertake evaluation work we tend to have two things in mind. Firstly, we want to establish the extent to which the project has fulfilled its objectives and outcomes. Secondly, we hope that the reports we write might also become a resource for learning, made available to a wider network of stakeholders who have an interest in the subject matter, in this case, arts & culture education.

The project being evaluated was really fascinating as it included the use of a unique outcomes framework developed by the innovative arts charity Mortal Fools. Seeking to understand the links between arts participation and wellbeing the model, called ‘PERMA’ invited young people and teachers to reflect regularly on Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement.

An enormous amount of data had been collected over the course of the project and a big part of our task was to analyse and interpret it. Presenting complex data in simple ways is something we consider very important at Goodlabs - it’s a running theme through most of our assignments. In this case we used ‘stock and flow’ charts to demonstrate the correlation between observations, highlighting distribution ranges as well as averages. The advantage of this approach is to be able to quickly see the general trend as well as any outliers.

If you’re having challenges understanding and communicating the story that your data is telling drop us a line, we’d love to help you get to grips with it.

The Impact of Community Organising

It was a pleasure to be in east London for the launch of a substantial new report describing the positive impact that can be made when local churches begin to employ the principles of community organising.

Click here to access the full report.

We’ve been providing consultancy support to the team at the Centre for Theology and Community (CTC) who, along with Citizens UK, have been running the ‘Organising for Growth’ project.

Funded by the Church of England, the project has worked within six parishes located in communities experiencing a range of complex social and economic challenges. However, the fascinating thing about Community Organising methodology is that even in the most difficult of situations it steadfastly refuses to become deficit-defined. Rather, there is a hope-full attitude, rooted in a strong belief about the inherent capacity people possess to change the circumstances around them, especially by working together. This belief is strengthened within a faith-based context that honours the essential dignity and equality of each person.

Having completed an interim evaluation in 2021 this has been a particularly longitudinal study that has provided a special opportunity to observe changes occurring as a sort of time-lapse. Having been first introduced to some of the key people involved in the work more than three years ago it has been fascinating to observe their journeys.

The event itself, inclusive and ecumenical in nature, was a real pleasure to be part of. Whilst hosted in an Anglican context (the historic St. George in the East, Shadwell) key parts were played by Catholic and Pentecostal clergy and congregations too. There were some lovely, poignant moments, and a lot of joy, as people reflected with gratitude on meaningful change taking place at the intersection of the community and the church.

Notes:

Click here to find out more about the work of CTC

Citizens UK defines Community Organising as:
“Bringing people together to win change. This means building community-led solutions to big and small problems, that work for everyone”. Find out more at: citizensuk.org/about-us/what-is-community-organising/

Decisions, decisions...

We know that choosing a CRM product can be bewildering. There are lots of different products out there, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. To help steer you onto the right track take a few minutes to look over our Cimpl decision tree. It will help you make an initial assessment of whether our product should be added to your shortlist. And remember, we offer a live demo even if you’re still just browsing.

Complex Needs, Cimpl Data

People can be complicated, but data shouldn’t be

A charity in the West Midlands recently asked for our support to transform their data management practices in relation to the recording of interactions with their clients. Their service users have multiple and complex needs, often relating to mental health, addiction, or both. A range of services are offered including 1:1 support, group work and also accommodation.

Through our Cimpl CRM for charities we were able to migrate them over to a more efficient and organised way of operating. No more client data hiding in Word documents hidden on Sharepoint, in Teams or even worse, on staff C drives. Now the whole team has role-related access to the clients relevant to their service. For management, reporting has been brought to life with realtime dashboards providing insight into service demand month by month. Clients presenting risks are more easily identified meaning that creating a safer environment for everyone.

The moral of the story is that whilst people may be complex, data can still be Cimpl!