Communicating Impact through Actionable Storytelling

Are you an impact manager looking to communicate the impact of an enterprise or specific programs?

The purpose of impact communication is to clearly and transparently demonstrate the social impact on people and the planet. Effective communication focuses on transparent reporting on all the programs, from the most material to the least. Compelling storytelling focuses on impact accounting principles defined by commonly accepted standards and frameworks, such as impact management projects.?

You are an impact manager looking to strategize a dashboard. You are presenting your dashboard to the board meeting. You start sharing the dashboard with the board, and your team asks you if they want to see a specific chart. Unfortunately, you have lost a battle. Good impact communication starts with clear and compelling storytelling. However, what is good storytelling?

• Presenting emotional testimony or pictures of beneficiaries that you serve
• Dashboards full of pie charts, bar charts on how many meals you served

What is the story?

Imagine yourself spending several weeks or months building an impact dashboard. Now you have your first chance to explain to your board.? The purpose of communicating impact is to clearly and transparently share the results of specific impact experiments.? The purpose of the impact experiment is to get feedback from stakeholders that can confirm some of your hypotheses.? Experiments can be related to product/program need validation, product/solution fit, or any other. Now imagine you have designed your experiment that involves collecting data from internal and/or external sources.

Your first sixty seconds are the most important where the board will pay attention to the rest of the story. The absence of a strong opener will force you into the rudimentary aspect of the dashboard as your dashboard will pay more attention to chart, color, and font and not what you learned from the impact experiment and how you will make an improvement before the next impact experiment.

A great opener should follow:

• Impact Statement
• Impact Summary?
• Impact Experiment?
• Impact Dimensions: WHO, WHAT, HOW MUCH, CONTRIBUTION, IMPACT RISK
• Future Action: 5–15 min.

Impact Statement

Impact Statement starts with, “What is the problem that we are trying to solve?” Impact Statement is often derived from your mission and vision but is quite definitive. Impact Statement leads to Impact, Outcome, Output, Activities, and Input.?

• If We...
• by...
• then...
• and ultimately…

?If we provide dignified, affordable housing to these underserved populations

By dignified housing, we care about using quality and sustainable materials as part of the architecture, as well as providing a safe and healthy environment for families. This includes access to basic amenities, transportation, schools, and businesses.

Then improve affordability and stability

And ultimately ensure a reduction in gentrification within Oakland's downtown

Impact Summary

This is the most important element of your story. It must be clear, transparent, and with actionable lessons.

A good summary will start with

During the last <..> months, we decided to engage our residents to gather feedback.?

WHAT: An immediate outcome that your impact experiment wanted to validate

WHO: Which stakeholders your program was focused on

HOW: Activities necessary to achieve the above outcome

LEARNINGS

• Learning 1
• Learning 2
• Learning 3

For example for Affordable Housing Program

Impact Experiment

Impact experiments are short and frequent experiments designed to gather stakeholder feedback.?

• Theory Of Change
• Stakeholder Survey
• Goal
• Stakeholder Survey Link
• Survey Type
• Population Size
• Sample Size
• Confidence Level
• Margin Of Error

Impact Evidence

While impact experiments focus on actual stakeholder feedback, often organizations should also focus on other evidence. While everyone's situation may be unique, you may want to consider following different option

• External Research
• External Data
• Data Unification and Query Approach?
• Scoring?
• Other Calculations
• Benchmarking

TAB Design

In Dashboard TAB offers unique separation to separate topics. However, the choice of TAB should be carefully considered. Depending on the type of organization, you have an opportunity to design a dashboard based on primary goals. For examples,?

Social Impact Program Aligned To Impact Management Project (IMP) can use -

• WHAT
• WHO
• HOW MUCH
• CONTRIBUTION
• IMPACT RISK

Funders might want to design based on portfolio composition.

• Aggregated Results
• Tabs By Portfolio Company
• Tabs By Impact Theme
• Tabs By Region
• Tabs By SDG

Please feel free to ask questions and post comments, below or in private.