Gillian Murray, Pilotlight’s Chief Executive looks at small charities’ challenges around measurement for our first blog post.
So, what can you expect from our new Pilotlight blog?
Well, over the next few months we will be reflecting on the topics that we know something about, from our experience with small charities and senior business leaders, hoping to engage, inform, inspire and challenge you all. Themes will include: governance, corporate giving, changes in public service commissioning, making the most of social media and many more.
This month we’re thinking a lot about measurement, both because work is underway on our own 2013 Evaluation report, and because measurement was the topic of our January Pilotlight Plus event.
2013 was a challenging year for the charity sector and not only because of the funding environment. What have made headlines most recently have been investigations into how charities pay their Chief Executives and manage their investments ethically. In this climate, it’s even more important that the case for supporting charities is powerfully made.
At our event, the Director of Fitzrovia Youth in Action (FYA), Andre Schott talked about the complexities of measurement for his organisation. FYA’s aims include increased confidence and community belonging, and while the organisation knows anecdotally and intuitively that their interventions have the desired outcomes, measuring these is challenging.
So how do small charities begin to measure and show the positive impact they have? Our starting point is:
Be clear about the difference you’re trying to make for your service users
A charity or social enterprise vision and mission statement often sets out what it wants to achieve in the most aspirational, broadest sense. A common format is ‘improving the lives of x type of people in y places’. Beneath these vision and mission statements, you often find more specific goals or aims. These tend to focus more on what the organisation will do – support 50% more service users by the end of the year, open another drop in centre, employ more staff; they often neglect to say anything specific about what it will achieve for its service users. It’s the difference the charities are hoping to make that will benefit from a clearer and more deliberate focus. Being clear about this is the first step in having any chance of measuring success in achieving key objectives.
At Pilotlight we recognise that understanding impact provides important insight into the strategic planning process (as well as reporting to funders and donors). So we are working with our partner charities early on in the engagement to help identify the change they aim to effect – we are referring to these as ‘social’ objectives to help distinguish them from the type of ‘business’ objectives that everyone is more familiar with.
Helping each of our charity partners to develop their measurement is a priority for 2014; we hope to share ideas about developing social objectives, and related challenges around collecting and managing data in the coming months.