#ThousandTrees

UPDATE: In December 2021 we hit our target of 1000 trees planted. We’ve decided to continue as we began and look forward to our hitting our next milestone of 2000!

As a business specialising in impact management it’s only right that we lead by example. As an expression of our concern about the climate emergency, and as a commitment to do our best to tread lightly on this beautiful planet, we are delighted to become an official partner of the global reforestation charity One Tree Planted.

Find out the full story below…

#ThousandTrees is our pledge to plant a forest of 1000 trees over the next 2 years. Over the course of their lifetime our trees will sequester an estimated 500 metric tonnes of CO2. We have chosen to plant our forest in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and a place that, due to its extreme poverty, has seen rapid deforestation in recent decades. Reforesting the hills of Haiti has a double bonus, as the trees not only sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but also protect against deadly flooding and landslips during hurricane season. Another benefit is to halt erosion, which combined with over-farming and poor agricultural methods, has destroyed the region’s soil, making it very difficult to grow food. The Goodlabs forest will help restore nutrients to the soil. Parallel programmes alongside the planting will teach local farmers how to use the land responsibly and profitably. Due to the tropical climate trees planted grow faster than here in Britain so the benefits of the scheme are realised more quickly too.

To find out more about One Tree Planted and how your business can partner to grow your own forest click here.

Intro to Impact Management

Is impact a good thing?

Impact isn’t generally used in a positive sense - as anyone who has had a prang in their car knows. Indeed, the dictionary defines it as “Forcible contact or collision”.

Impact generally leaves a noticeable impression. It often produces a change in shape. So why do we use the word impact in the context of the lives of the people that we work with? 

It is helpful to think of impact in the artistic sense of the word, for example a sculptor chipping away to bring out something special and valuable.

Speaking the lingo (definitions)

Impact sits within a wider cluster of ideas that relate to the effectiveness of the services that we deliver, including:  

• Outputs, which tell us how busy we have been:
  They typically count of the number of times we did something,
  e.g. provided 17 coffee mornings attended by a total of 28 older people.

• Outcomes, which tell us how effective we have been:
  They summarise what changed as a result of the activity/service being delivered, e.g. 75% of participants reported being less socially isolated.

• Indicators, which are the building blocks of evidence:
  They are the specific things we track in order to show an outcome is being achieved, e.g. reducing sugar intake and walking more are both indicators of physical health.

• Impact, which describes the overall effect of our work:
  Patterns in outcomes data over time are used to tell the bigger story of how a service is making a difference within a population, e.g. We saw a moderate improvement in the health of 65-75 year old men last year.

Sector Trends

When Impact first came on the scene the preoccupation was with measurement. There was a sense that collecting lots of data reassured organisations of their professionalism. Over time organisations realised that they were accumulating lots of data but lacked the ability to interpret and understand the story that the data was telling them.  

Impact Management is a more recent development that places the emphasis on being very clear on what data is being collected and why. Within Impact Management the aim of reporting on Outputs and Outcomes is in order to understand what aspects of a service are being effective and to identify where it is proving more challenging to achieve positive change. Data is used to aid reflection and learning, with a view to continuous and intelligent service improvement.

Social Impact

Within the world of Impact the phrase Social Impact is often discussed. This represents a desire to make claims about the ‘knock-on effect’ of organisational impact through the wider social system, e.g. reductions in A&E admissions or reduced demand on Social Care services. ‘Social Return on Investment’ sits at the most difficult end of impact reporting involving complex mathematics and economics based on principles such as ‘Attribution’ e.g. how can you be sure that the improvement you saw in the wellbeing of a client was due to your intervention and not some other factor?

Expert economists have produced a variety of databases containing a wide range of ‘Financial proxies’ which seek to apply £ values to the outcomes achieved, e.g. frequent moderate exercise has a wellbeing effect of £4179. It is fair to say that within the sector are both enthusiasts for, and sceptics of, the £ values proposed in these economic models.   

Where next?

If you’d like to have a chat with us about how impact management can be used to drive improvement within your charity, social enterprise or business just drop a line to: impact@goodlabs.uk

Covid-19 Local Data Maps

At Goodlabs we believe that accurate and transparent data is absolutely critical to good decision-making.

People have been telling us that the vital data required to compare Covid-19 impact around the country is buried deep in Government websites and not easy to find.

To make life a bit easier for you two of the key data maps illustrating deaths occurring due to the disease are shown below. They are fully interactive and provided by the Office for National Statistics.

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Creating an Impact Framework

Change must not be left to chance. Before deciding where to invest their money in your organisation Funders and Commissioners need to be reassured that you can reliably deliver result. This short webinar by our MD, Matt Wilson, provides an overview of to begin putting together a framework for measuring, monitoring and managing the impact that is being made by your charity or social enterprise.

Impact management and cancer breakthroughs

One of the biggest medical stories of the year so far was last week’s announcement that a new gene test can be used through which “70% of women with the most common form of early stage breast cancer can be spared the agony of chemotherapy". The method applied in the new cancer research is a perfect case study for anyone interested in impact management.

Much like complex medicines, the majority of change-oriented human services are not single-hit remedies but rather combined intervention packages that combine to create an effect over time. An employability scheme may involve life-skills training, mock interviews and work experience. A drug rehab scheme may bring together medication with one-to-one counselling and group therapy. You’ll be able to think of many more examples.  

An impact management approach always strives to ask not simply “what is our success rate” but to go deeper asking “what can we discover about who our intervention is and isn’t successful for, and why”. That’s the question that drove the breast cancer research team to make their breakthrough. They discovered that for the majority of women treated the chemotherapy element of the intervention proved to be wholly ineffective and unnecessary. So is this a question that your organisation is giving due consideration to?  

At Goodlabs we believe that a disciplined approach to service delivery, supported by appropriate data collection and the opportunity for the delivery team to regularly reflect together on results is essential to generating these sort of breakthrough insights.

Finally, a related ethical question worth considering is, “If you discovered tomorrow that an element of your service provision is ineffective for a certain client group – what would you do?” What if that service is part of a commissioning package for which you are well paid? How likely would you be to implement changes to your model, and how quickly? Would you begin to screen out certain clients from your service – after all, why waste their time and yours? Could you re-design aspects of your service to better meet the needs of those for whom it is found to be ineffective?

All vital questions that today’s social leaders need to be wrestling with! Do leave a comment to let me know if any of this resonates with you. 

The Art of Impact

I’m looking forward to presenting at the annual YMCA Chief Executives Network conference later this week. My focus will be on the recent Impact Management project I’ve been doing for YMCA Humber and YMCA North Tyneside.

Kicking off the session I want to face the fact that for those in the business of restoring damaged lives ‘Impact’ is a pretty bizarre choice of word. It is defined as “forcible contact or collision; the act of striking against”. As anyone who’s had a prang in their car knows that impact leaves a noticeable impression. The force can produce an unwanted change in shape. So how can this be a positive thing?

This is why we need to place the idea of Impact within the wider discipline of Impact Management. The positive potential of Impact is unleashed when it is carefully controlled and directed. Think about the way a sculptor skilfully rests the chisel against the rock before striking with just the right amount of force. Deploying a lucid imagination, a trained eye and the repetition of artfully applied blows beauty is slowly revealed. 

When considered this way Impact Management suddenly feels like a perfectly appropriate way to describe a process of personal transformation.

Of course every metaphor has its limitations and I won’t be wanting to give the CEO’s gathered the impression that their organisation’s clients are lifeless boulders. What I do want to do however is to help people to see that Impact Management is not an obscure branch of science to be sub-contracted to spreadsheet-happy ex-accountants; rather it is an artisan process, concerned with deeply human subject matter.

I believe that if we can first conceive of Impact Management as an Art rather than a Science, then we will ensure that we keep in mind the necessity and intensity of personal investment required. In doing this we will avoid losing touch with the real people whose stories often remain hidden in the aggregate data. We will foster working environments for our teams that unlock the imagination they need to respond on a daily basis to the raw human material as they journey with clients in their process of restoration and lasting transformation.

Do let me know any thoughts you might have about the distinction between Impact as an Art and Impact as a Science. I’d love to hear from you.

Showing your Impact to Donors

When we give to charity we like to know that our donation is going to make an impact. Much of this is based on trust. We receive communication from the charity about the nature and extent of the work they're delivering and draw our conclusions from it. If we want to be particularly diligent, perhaps because we’re thinking about making a large donation, we might take a look at their last available annual report. Typically this will include a chart that seeks to offer a degree of transparency about how much it costs to run the charity (i.e. its administrative overheads) in relation to the amount spent on delivering its core mission, what we might call its interventions. 

On this basis all charities tend to look very similar. Trustee boards and executive teams know that donors don't like to see too much money being spent on overheads, expecting as much of their giving as possible to be directed to the ‘front line’. This is where understanding Impact makes all the difference.

The Charity annual report, increasingly referred to as an ‘Impact report’, will describe the nature and variety of work being undertaken, along with statistics about how much of it is happening and who is benefitting from it i.e. elderly people, children, donkeys etc. For an Annual Report to truly become an Impact Report it needs to give a clear picture of what is changing for the better as a result of its interventions.

An awkward, but legitimate question that a donors might ask, is:

• how often does the charity make an intervention without any change resulting?

We can explain this using the diagrams below.

Charity A and Charity B are involved in identical work, both with annual turnovers of £1 million. On the surface seem to be identically efficient – with 10% of their income going to overheads and the rest to interventions.

However, if we could see more deeply into the impact of the two charities we would see that Charity A has an 80% success rate and Charity B has a 50% success rate.

If a donor has £100 to give it would now be clear to which charity that donation would be most effectively directed. 

Finally, if the donor really wants to be assured that their giving will make the maximum impact then it would also be good to know what the expected success rate is within that particular sector. For example, charities working to rehabilitate ex-prisoners may be delighted if half of those they work with to go straight. If the focus of the charity is helping unemployed school leavers to get jobs then the expected rate of impact might be more like 80%.

Goodlabs believes that if charities will be more transparent with their donors about these issues, then greater trust will result, which is essential to a long-term donor engagement strategy.  

If you run a charity and would like help in demonstrating your Impact to potential donors then drop us a line at impact@goodlabs.uk

Triple Bottom Line

It's almost impossible to conceive of the recent emergence of the Social Value and Social Impact without giving credit to the idea of ‘Triple Bottom Line’ (aka TBL/3BL), a revolutionary business philosophy pioneered by John Elkington in the mid 1990’s. TBL argues that successful and sustainable organisations create (or destroy) value within three distinct but inter-related arenas – social, economic and environmental.

Economic success: The financial bottom line remains the ultimate barometer of the performance of an organisation, whatever the sector it operates in. It is of no surprise then that there are over 300,000 accountants in the UK. Goodlabs is comfortable working with accountants, but is in no way seeking to duplicate their work.

Environmental success: Increased regulation as well as changes in public mood have led to the emergence of a busy environmental consultancy sector ensuring that organisations meet relevant sustainability standards. It is becoming increasingly common for firms to produce a ‘sustainability report’ alongside the publishing of their annual accounts. Goodlabs is comfortable working with consultants in this sector, but again is not seeking to duplicate their work either.

Social success: The social dimension of TBL remains poorly defined and under-resourced. Organisations that wish to demonstrate that they are having a positive impact within human society, for individuals, families and communities, cannot draw on the same levels of expertise that can be found in the financial and environmental sectors. Where expertise does exist the fees make accessing help cost-prohibitive for all but the largest corporations.

This is precisely the gap that Goodlabs now fills...

The New Convergence

As we progress further into the 21st century we are witnessing increasing convergence between the public, private and voluntary sectors. The public sector is commissioning out more of its work. Private sector and voluntary sector often bid against one another for the contracts. The effect is that charities are needing to become more commercially astute and businesses are needing to become more socially aware. A new common ground is emerging in the process, a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between costs, impacts, outcomes and value creation. The ability to articulate, measure, report and communicate social value, as distinct from financial bottom line, is becoming an essential requirement.