DRIVING SOCIAL IMPACT: IMPACT TOOLS & STRATEGIES

THE PURPOSE

The Community

As we’ve mentioned before, that impact “sweet spot” is when community needs, company priorities and employee interests overlap. Nonprofits often find themselves reconciling community needs with company priorities. But what if as you build your program you ask, “How is my company uniquely qualified to meet a need in our community?” By rooting your vision for community impact in the needs first, it creates opportunities for nonprofits to leverage both the resources (financial and in-kind) and human capital (i.e., volunteers) of your company to achieve desired outcomes.

What a nonprofit needs to achieve these outcomes and what a company may be able to contribute does not always perfectly align. However, companies focused on understanding and tracking outcomes with their nonprofit partners can have a much greater impact in the community. At the end of the day, companies must consider that they are serving people and that outputs misaligned with the needs can cause more harm than good.

Shared interest and objectives co-created with the community can help develop stronger partnerships and more impactful change than is often achieved through occasional volunteer projects or financial contributions.

Your Business & Employees

Even the largest and most successful companies have limited resources designated for community engagement — so why not use them in the most efficient and effective way possible? Think through your “inputs.” These would be activities you are planning, number of volunteers, research on community needs. Are your efforts to engage employees, and ultimately send them out to support the community, working to drive your intended outcomes?

Perhaps you are hoping to improve employee morale or skill development while making a difference in your community. Are you able to meet multiple objectives with your current strategy? If not, or you’re not sure, this is a great opportunity to evaluate what you are tracking and measuring.

Understanding the return on your investments in this sense also helps you advocate for the importance of your community engagement programs and for additional resources. Ultimately, if you make outcome (rather than output) measurement central to your community engagement program, you will be able to translate good intentions into real community impact.

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THE TOOLS

Social Impact Measurement

Let’s decide what to measure! Understanding and measuring the social impact of your community engagement work is necessary to ensure the greatest impact from your investments. You may decide to focus your tracking on general volunteering, pro bono services, social capital (like advocacy), giving or a combination of these. Consider the “why” behind these efforts below:

1. Employee volunteerism, general and skills-based, generates social value when it helps nonprofit organizations improve capacity to carry out their mission.
2. Grants generate social value when they enable nonprofit organizations to deliver services that improve the well-being of targeted beneficiaries or solve targeted social issues.
3. Like grants, in-kind goods generate social value when they enable nonprofit organizations to deliver services that improve the well-being of targeted beneficiaries or solve targeted social issues.
4. Lastly, leadership and advocacy efforts generate social value by changing behaviors and/or policies to improve targeted social issues.

If you choose to track one or all of these social measures of impact, you should consider “how” or “what” metrics make the most sense for you to achieve the desired outcomes.

To better understand the metrics of social impact, consider an example of employees volunteering to tutor students in an after-school program. These definitions might seem academic, but it is important to grasp the concepts that help you successfully track, measure and advocate for your community engagement programs.

• Quantitative Inputs. Often these are the resources committed to the program.
  • Example: Volunteers signed up to tutor; financial resources used to fund the program
• Quantitative Outputs. These are the drivers that lead to the outcomes. Remember that outputs are important if you can connect them to the desired outcome.
  • Example: Number of tutoring sessions held
• Qualitative Outcome Metrics. These metrics are intangible success or improvement and/or predefined satisfaction.
  • Example: Survey given to students and employees to capture satisfaction level with program and feedback (over trending results, rather than a single data point)
• Quantitative Outcome Metrics. These capture the observed effect, change in condition or resulting improvement and are often numerical.
  • Example: Number of students that increase testing scores or grades

Don’t worry! It is not up to you alone to put these concepts into practice. It is an opportunity to connect with your nonprofit partners and grantees to e articulate the roll your contributions will play in scaling and delivering their metrics and outcomes.

In many cases, they may already be tracking inputs and outcomes for their various programs; in other cases, this may open a conversation and opportunity to provide financial and skills-based volunteers to help develop these measures and tracking systems.

Keep in mind that other organizations already dedicated to tracking and measure outcomes have rich reporting that you may be able to leverage when advocating for your program. These could have a local focus (economic empowerment zones, school districts), be part of a national or global reporting initiative (UN Sustainable Development Goals, Global Reporting Initiative), be specific to your industry, or be issue focused (STEM education). The more relevant data you layer, the more credibility you add to your community engagement strategy.

Business Impact Measurement

Much like social impact measurement, business impact measurement can be just as powerful when building the case for your community engagement programming. Your community engagement work can generate business value through a variety of ways, from generating PR and driving sales to developing employee skills and improving workplace morale. Consider the “why” behind these efforts:

1. Maximize the return on your philanthropic investments and activities
2. Advocate for additional resources and support
3. Generate Buy-in from senior leadership
4. Benchmark your work to promote continuous improvement

To better understand the metrics of business impact, revisit the same definitions from our social impact discussion and consider these examples set in a context of a company’s skills-based/pro bono volunteering program.

• Quantitative Inputs. Often these are the resources committed to the program.
  • Example: Number of employee volunteers participating in the program
• Quantitative Outputs. These are the drivers that lead to the outcomes. Remember that outputs are important if you can connect them to the desired outcome.
  • Example: Number of projects completed
• Qualitative Outcome Metrics. These metrics are intangible success or improvement and/or predefined satisfaction.
  • Example: Survey given to students and employees to capture satisfaction level with program and feedback (Over trending results, rather than a single data point)
• Quantitative Outcome Metrics. These capture the observed effect, change in condition or resulting improvement and are often numerical.
  • Example: Percent increase in a specific skill competency based on pre/post survey of employees participating in the program

Business Structure & Strategy  

What if you could take your company beyond profit? People, profit and planet can be prioritized throughout all lines of business when considering a more socially focused business model. Examples of this include becoming a Certified B Corporation, or commonly referred to as B Corp, and setting up a separate corporate foundation. B Corp companies are legally required to consider their impact on employees, customers, suppliers, community and the environment. This legal structure helps companies legally balance purpose and profit and also connects them to a growing network of organizations and customers who want businesses to be a force for good.

Setting up a separate foundation for your company can have many benefits including engaging in charitable activities that would not otherwise be tax-deductible (this is always good for your bottom line), establishing consistent giving levels through an endowment, and reducing overhead costs by utilizing tax policies around foundation staffing.

Perhaps most advantageous is that establishing a corporate foundation can help make your company’s charitable giving more strategic by having grant criteria, guidelines and reporting requirements.

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THE ACTION PLAN

We have a little homework for you before you start to measure and track your impact to strengthen your employee engagement strategy. It is important to reflect before you measure because tracking inputs unrelated to desired outcomes won’t show the true value of our strategy. Consider these questions and the reflections below as you get started.

Are your employee engagement activities and investments driving community and social outcomes?

Don’t worry — most companies may have an idea but not a thorough understanding for how their inputs (volunteer hours, donations, in-kind contributions) are helping drive their outcomes in the community. We suggest having a discussion with your nonprofit partners to better understand this relationship and the measurable impact of their work. This insight is not only useful for measurement purposes, but also for communicating to stakeholders about the value of your volunteerism and investments.

Are your community engagement activities meeting expectations of your employees and those of your nonprofit partners?

With any volunteer project, you should capture satisfaction metrics and feedback from both your volunteers and your nonprofit partners. Capturing and reviewing this information helps you ensure the project meets expectations on both sides and provides you with insights to continually improve your program.

Are you tracking employee volunteer hours?

Tracking employee volunteer hours (hands-on and skills-based/pro bono) is a critical part of any employee engagement strategy but can often be a challenge for many companies. Employee volunteering metrics can be used to benchmark your program. The hourly value of a corporate volunteer can help you and your company leaders better understand the return on investment. There are a variety of methods and tools that companies can use to track employee volunteer hours based on their needs, budget and existing HR systems. Just having the proper tool to track this information isn’t enough — you will still need to create a plan for how you actually get employees to report their hours (e.g., incentives, timely reminders, storytelling). Get creative!

Are you tracking the business impact of your community engagement program?

If you answered no, you’re not alone — most companies aren’t, but you will be surprised at how easily you may be able to compile and capture business metrics relating to your community engagement work. As a first step, we recommend making a “what-why-how” list for each department or business function where your community impact work is integrated (or where you hope to integrate). For each, list out what you ideally want to track, why you want to track it and how you might track it. For example, you might want to track the number and value of contracts with minority-owned businesses to report the diversification of your suppliers; you could get this data from your purchasing department every quarter. Or maybe you want to track the impact your volunteer programs have on employees and their sense of purpose, given the direct impact these may have on retention. For the “how,” you may need to work with HR to design a survey that captures this information from your employee volunteers.

How are you reporting your community and business impact metrics?

Once you determine the community and business metrics you want to track, start to compile this information into a dashboard report. Centralizing and organizing all these metrics will not only reveal greater insights, but it will also help you communicate the value and impact of your volunteerism and community investments to key stakeholders. And be sure to set recurring reminders to update the report so that the data stays current (rather than having to update it when your boss asks for it)!

Are there other standardized reporting metrics or frameworks with which you can align your work?

Aligning your work and metrics with other standardized metrics and frameworks is not only helpful for telling your community impact story in the broader context of a broader movement, it also connects you to other like-minded organizations and presents an opportunity for learning and sharing best practices. Keep in mind that other organizations already dedicated to tracking and measuring outcomes have rich reporting that you may be able to leverage when advocating for your program. These could have a local focus (economic empowerment zones, school districts), be part of a national or global reporting initiative (UN Sustainable Development Goals, Global Reporting Initiative), be specific to your industry, or be issue focused (STEM education). The more relevant data you layer, the more credibility you add to your community engagement strategy.

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