Cultivating Diversity – BME Community Enterprise Toolkit

is a social impact measurement
What
system?
There has been recent evolution in the way that Community Businesses consider social
impact. Drivers include the changing views of grant funders and investors as a well as
several externally funded capacity building programmes supporting the development
of social impact methodology. The focus has shifted away from considering social
impact as an annual undertaking as part of an annual review, towards developing a
systematic, ongoing processes of data gathering where at any point an organisation can
produce impact information.
This would enable Community Businesses to treat impact information in a similar way
to financial information – to inform the decision making of the board on a continuous
basis. A gold standard for Community Businesses is to embed the use of social impact
data in support of a process of continuous organisational improvement.
Key stages in developing a simple social impact measurement system include:
Developing Theory of Change (identifying what information to gather)
Designing methods to capture this information (sign in books, customer feedback forms,
Individual learning plans, case study pro-forma) and determine when and how to gather it
Developing the electronic database and hard copy filing system that will store this information.
This is the Management Information System
Designing reports and reporting schedule
(which will summarise impact information for the audience)
Training staff/ volunteers in the implementation of the system
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