What impact do we want to make?
The core duty of the Care Act is "to promote that individual’s well-being."
KeyRing’s vision and mission are:
Vision
A welcoming world with communities that celebrate the skills and talents of everybody.
Mission
KeyRing connects people and inspires them to build the life they want.
We want to make sure that we measure how we are progressing towards these through our impact measurement. We need a system to do this.
What do people want to know?
Different people want to know different things about the impact we are having. They may also want to hear it in different ways.
Why do we need to improve our impact measurement and communication?
We already do things that measure impact including:
- Outcomes Star
- Member Satisfaction Survey
- Case Studies
- Local Authority reporting
- Independent studies such as Financial Case for KeyRing
Too often these measure inputs (what’s been done), outputs (what has happened) and miss the impact (what change has occurred), so we need to change that.
What are we doing to get better?
We needed to take a good look at what we need to do to get something that is meaningful and useful for measuring and communicating impact.
We started by exploring the fundamental questions around our impact measurement. We had two workshops, a month apart, in June and July/August 2020. These were to be held in a physical venue; because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we moved them to Zoom.
There were 27 attendees, drawn from across KeyRing:
- Members
- Volunteers
- Community Enablers
- Support Managers
- Regional Managers
- Central Support Staff
- Senior Management
- Trustees
We secured the skills and experience of Ashraf Hamzah, Social Impact Manager at Mayday Trust, to facilitate these workshops and Ashraf has been invaluable in guiding us through this exploration.
In these workshops, people identified:
- Why we want to measure our impact
- What success looks like
- How we might measure success and impact
- What things tell us that change has happened
- How we would like to hear about impact and success
- How we make sure we keep impact measurement relevant
Over the coming months, we need to:
- Bring all this wonderful information together (Ashraf and Senior Management Team)
- Use this to create a system that measures impact well
- Ensure that we continue to learn and refine it