Making an IMPACT

INSIGHTS

STRATEGIC AND EFFECTIVE IMPACT

Grantmakers are moving to be more strategic with their priorities and funding. They are seeking a greater understanding of social issues, fostering collaboration between grant partners, and aligning dollars and activities to focus on community outcomes over outputs. To position yourself strategically, it’s important to get to know prospective grantees, partners, and communities you seek to impact. It is also important to center your grantmaking on their experiences and clear insights. While data is currently more accessible than ever, organizations struggle with understanding the value and impact of that data.

How can organizations get better insights?

Measure Outcomes | Most times when organizations speak about impact, they talk about their numbers, their outputs. “We served 500 youth.” However, what are the programmatic and social outcomes of those youth? What did they achieve? How did your dollars effectively make the social change that was made in their lives?

Most of our social issues are ingrained in our society, institutions, and communities - causing impact to be regressive and take time for change. While outputs are integral to making impact, identifying and measuring immediate outcomes tell a clearer picture of progress.

Visualize Progress | Whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly, seeing your progress provides insights into what is working, where gaps are, and where pivots need to be made. There are many ideas of what progress looks like, or what a community or partner perceives the changes that need to be are. It’s critical to consider and align these perspectives during the strategic funding process. Waiting for a year to see a report and not understanding how to analyze and understand its insights will prohibit you from seeing these perspectives and knowing what progress, if any, was truly made.

Being able to easily see progress helps your funding meet its intended priorities, and also provides resources, builds trust, and helps your partners with their success in the community you both are working to change.

By measuring outcomes and visualizing progress, organizations will be able to more strategically and effectively understand and make an impact.

NEWS

Empact Data Solutions (EDS) is proud to announce our partnership with Policy Map. Our analysis takes into account the communities being served based on open data and their voice. Via our partnership with Policy Map, EDS utilizes validated data to provide insights related to health, housing, jobs, incomes, government incentives, employment, demographics, local institutions, and more.

empactful is a newsletter of Empact Data Solutions