Impact Reporting

For some entities, a standalone impact report may well add weight to your communication objectives. Not-for-profits often find that this is the most important story for them to tell clearly.

It’s a communication strategy that is used to convey the change created by your organisation and how you effected that change. It looks through outputs to more specifically focus on outcomes.

For others, impact reporting may just be part of the total reporting narrative.

While preparing an Impact report should follow many of the same principles of storytelling covered in detail on this site, some specifics are useful to keep in mind:

• Be clear about the problems you are trying to address. If you are a charity or a provider that exists to change people’s lives in some way (such as some government departments or agencies), your Impact report goal will be to maximise the difference your organisation makes to people. If you are a business, your focus in an Impact report is more likely to be about how your activities minimise your impact on the environment, on the natural resources that you use, and reduce the potential harm your activities may cause to society. Obviously that’s an over-simplification, but the point is, do the thinking about the impacts your organisation makes and be clear from the outset about the story you need to convey.

• Know and articulate the targets you set yourself. In order to be accountable to yourselves and to your external audiences, have an established set of success indicators that you measure your progress against.

• Explain your activities. What are you doing to achieve these goals, be they increasing positive impacts or reducing negative ones?

• Report outcomes. What are the measurable results of these activities?

• Provide evidence. How do you know you’ve made a difference?

• Employ qualitative and quantitative information. Tell stories of real life activities, human impacts, social or environmental wins, and back the stories with facts and figures. Sometimes, it can be difficult for data to feel real to readers, but equally, graphs and charts without real-world narrative context can fail to communicate the real and lasting benefits of what you have achieved. Remember, qualitative data can be more than just numbers and percentages. Add testimonials, quotes, case studies and survey responses to help situate your impact analysis in the context of real people.