Organisations have for some time reported financial results, but reporting the less tangible aspects of an organisation’s work and its impact upon beneficiaries is more problematic. Nevertheless, the idea is here to stay and several have produced clear and informative reports on their impact.
Impact reporting really gathered momentum in 2004, when the charity Commission published its guidance Hallmarks of an Effective Charity, which stated that “an effective charity considers the impact it that it wants to have and actually has on the people who benefit from it”.
The Impact Coalition, now housed within Acevo after spending its first years at the Institute of Fundraising, was set up in 2006 to improve accountability and transparency in the sector and considers itself the starting point for good impact reporting.
A free guide on how civil society organisations can improve their effectiveness and impact reporting has been released to the sector.
With social investment high on government’s agenda, frameworks and toolkits for measuring returns are becoming increasingly important, says Vibeka Mair.
The Disasters Emergency Committee has hit back at claims in a Lancet editorial that the Haiti earthquake relief effort has been marred by competition among aid agencies, as it reports its fundraising total has reached £42m.
Bouncing around in the back of a dusty truck I fired one volley of questions after another. I had them captive. There was no escape. Who has the money? How do you organise the transport? How many in each of those boxes? How many people working with you? Where did you keep the books? I took every chance that came my way – on the road, in hotel lobbies, propping up the bar. Day and night, asking questions of anyone and everyone, anytime and all the time. Resistance would have been futile. I was on a mission to get to the bottom of this.
The first three articles in this series described why charities are focusing on results, how to develop scorecards to track performance and how to establish performance management systems. This article looks at the challenges of selecting the best measures of performance.
Two young, enthusiastic, well-educated professionals want to donate a week of their time. Anyone want them?
GamCare, the advice and counselling charity for problem gamblers, is worried that it will be sidelined and have its funding slashed under new proposals from the Responsible Gambling Strategy Board.
It sounds like a warm, fuzzy, cardigan-ed idea that could only be borne out of a cosy Oxbridge office, walled in by leather-bound books and the all-pervasive odour of hope. But the Oxford boffin who has pledged to give away £1m over his career, and has created a society to get people to do the same, is no generous dope. His pipe dream is much more substance than smoke, and only the best charities will see a penny.
Recently the UK homelessness charity, Crisis, announced it is using SROI analysis to publicise and put a financial value on the benefits of its ‘Skylight’ schemes. While Crisis should be applauded for this effort — not enough big charities measure their results, and even fewer share the results and the details of their attempts to do this — in this post I want to sanction caution about the use of social return on investment (SROI) as a sole means of capturing charitable impact.
Charities are failing to measure the satisfaction of their supporter base, lagging behind the commercial sphere and potentially losing donors unnecessarily, according to a leading academic. Professor Adrian Sargeant said that the lack of satisfaction measurement among charities is a “real problem” in light of the impact that satisfaction levels have on donor loyalty. Charities may survey their supporters with respect to what they do with their beneficiaries, he said, but barely any are systematically measuring satisfaction with how they are dealt with as donors.
The NCVO is to argue for a new approach to the notion of impact, as too much emphasis is placed upon measurement and not enough on ‘impact leadership’, according to its head of strategy and impact Dr Richard Piper. Speaking at the Charity Finance Live conference on Monday, Piper (pictured) said: “Our contention is that over the last 15 years, the topic of impact has been essentially owned by the disciplines of evaluation and research. We’re not knocking that, but this has had a number of damaging effects.”
Charity Finance Live is a one day conference that will enhance your personal development and deliver insights that enable you to drive forward the financial strategy of your charity. Researched and designed with our senior sector advisory panel, who understand the increased financial and delivery pressures you face. Charity Finance Live provides you with a clear grasp of how the financial crisis of 2008 has impacted on the sector, how lessons learnt can be applied to your charity and what the future holds for civil society.
The second of four articles on managing performance by Mike Hudson, author of Managing Without Profit. Organisations need a structured way to assemble and manage performance information. Whilst most maintain financial information in highly prescribed and systematic ways, many report information on the achievement of their objectives in surprisingly unstructured and fragmented ways. Information on performance is often collected in different parts of the organisation, on different timescales and in different formats. It is therefore hardly surprising that some organisations find it difficult to maintain an overview of performance on a regular basis.
I love the Tap Project. Let me just put that out there. This is not a cool, removed journalistic analysis of a fundraising campaign. Not at all. I am enthusiastically biased. The Tap Project makes me want to pay for water in a restaurant. It’s that good
Savvy donors are no longer interested in flattering self-portraits from charities. They want more transparency from impact reporting as Celina Ribeiro reports Donors are becoming more demanding. Charities can no longer hang 'genius at work' signs outside their doors and expect their supporters to wait patiently to be shown a finished masterpiece.
Red Nose Day has raised a record £80m for charity this year. The final total is the result of a number of fundraising efforts, with corporate partners producing particularly good figures; Stella McCartney t-shirts sold at TK Maxx raised more than £3.3m, while Sainsbury’s brought in more than £11m via the sale of red noses. Comic Relief chief executive Kevin Cahill said the organisation was impressed with the feat, particularly in light of the recession. “We’ve been bowled over by this extraordinary result.
Many argue for the removal, or replacement, of 'donate now' buttons on charity websites. But a recent usability study of such sites shows that many users find it hard to donate. So who's right?
The time for talking about improved accountability is over: this year must be about action and outcomes, says Amanda Powell-Smith Charities and donors are both asking questions about where they should prioritise their spend and how they can make their limited funds work harder. In 2009, the word to keep at the heart of all communications planning is ‘impact’.
Impact reporting will become even more important over the next few years as charities are forced to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work in a tougher funding environment, the chair of the sector’s new Funding Commission has predicted. In an interview with Charity Finance, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England, outlined the Commission’s remit for the next year and said it would spend the first few months indentifying the key funding issues that the sector needs to address. These may include the impact of the stock-market slump on endowed foundations; the impact of house price falls on legacies, and the growing prevalence of “outcome-based funding”.
The standard of impact reporting in the sector is held back by a lack of clarity on definitions and measurement tools, finds Vibeka Mair. The NCVO reaches the ripe old age of 90 this year. Part of its birthday celebrations include the launch of a celebrity-backed campaign to encourage the public to donate £2 a month to charity. The campaign will promote generic causes, such as the environment or human rights, rather than singling out specific charities. Famous people will talk about the issues which concern them and encourage the public to give small, regular donations to their favourite cause, to ensure their local charities are supported during the recession and beyond.
Direct dealings with local government bodies improve the success of the voluntary sector, according to a survey on public sector support for local third sector organisations from the Office of the Third Sector (OTS).
Charities' standing in the public eye has leapt up in the past year, with 65 per cent of British adults saying they trust charities compared with just 42 per cent in July 2007, according to a survey from research consultancy nfpSynergy.
The Public Administration Select Committee's call for a statutory register of lobbying activity is a huge step forward and should be implemented by government as soon as possible, according to the voluntary sector's Alliance for Lobbying Transparency.
wherever I‘ve worked, I have seen fundraisers often fall into the traps of not using all of the right measures to assess the true value of certain fundraising activities. Let’s look at Acquisition specifically.
Capacitybuilders has commissioned the largest-ever evaluation of the impact of the government's investment into third sector support services.
VSO has had a dramatic turn in fortune, with record levels of enquiries for volunteering posts over the winter.
Pro Bono Economics is to be a new charity that will harness the skills of economists and deploy them to charities that want help to measure their impact.
Speaking Up has become the first graduate of venture philanthropy pioneer Impetus Trust's investment programme.
The RNID has upheld its position at the forefront of impact reporting by presenting its 2007/2008 report online through an innovative web portal – costing up to £12,000.
Cats Protection is contacting up to 99 charities that may have money deposited in the Iceland bank Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander in a bid to convince them to support its demands for charity representation on the creditors committee.