Whether we’re using expressions like ‘social impact’ or ‘impact evaluation’ we’re talking about the same thing. So what is impact? To understand, let’s go on vacation.
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Impact of your vacation
Your family of four goes on a 5-day vacation to a beautiful beach in Mexico. When you return home, everyone asks, “did you have a good time?”
“Yes,” you reply out of habit.
But, how do you know if your vacation was good or bad?
In your mind you begin to think of the purpose of going on vacation. Maybe you hoped to:
- Get closer as family
- Be happy and bonded
- Feel relaxed
These are the longer-term effects that you wanted to achieve. These are the impact of the vacation. Did these things happen? How do you know?
Driving your vacation strategy
Guess what? You’re not actually in direct control of this impact. That’s why your teenager came back grumpy despite your best efforts.
To improve and ensure good results on your next vacation, you need to start at the beginning. Let’s trace our way back along a line of cause-and-effect. This is called a logic model and it looks like this:
Determining what happens in each of these steps in the logic model helps you understand how (or if) you achieve your goals. For your vacation it could look like this:
Your direct control over what happens occurs by deciding the activities and stops to a degree, with the outputs. Ever noticed that nonprofit organizations and social enterprises usually report outputs? That’s because they are clearer to declare – and related to what they can control. But outputs are not outcomes, and they are certainly not impact.
Impact evaluation
Now you understand how your vacation planning causes intended and unintended effects. So was your vacation objectively good?
Impact evaluation is all about determining measurable criteria for each of the different outcomes and resulting changes. We measure these things through objective and subjective sources:
- Feedback from your family – Was the food good? Did you enjoy the surfing?
- Minutes spent together as a family
- Number of instances of smiling or laughing while together
- Minutes spent on the phone while in each other’s presence
All of these measures give us a clearer picture of whether or not we’re moving along our logic model to produce family bonding and happiness.
Social Impact
A recent buzz word in the nonprofit and social enterprise industry, “social impact” refers to quantified and qualified measurements of outcomes. It is the intended or unintended, positive or negative effects that a program has on people and the environment. Social impact organizations want to increase the positive effects while minimizing the negative. To do that, they will establish the same kind of logic model and criteria we used to assess our vacation.
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Making a splash
Impact is the big-picture, long-term group of effects that we want to have. To do it well, you need a clear logic model and criteria to determine if you’re moving forward. We hope you enjoy your next vacation!
Photo by Yulianto Poitier from Pexels