Making An Impactful Impact

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I overheard someone say, “Our impact statements need to be more impactful.” This comment stuck out to me because it really highlights what so many organizations face daily. You know you need to show your impact, but what is really meant by your impact? What is an impactful impact statement?

Most importantly, an impact statement needs to align with your organization’s mission and what your supporters find important. If your mission doesn’t match your supporters’ intent, people will lose interest in your organization.

So where do you start? First, discuss the following questions with your team and your close supporters. Why does our organization exist? What is our mission?

Next, define your SMART goals, which show both your organization’s outputs and outcomes. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timed. If your goals aren’t SMART, then you will struggle to fulfill, measure, or meet your goals. For example, Chocolate For All will increase chocolate distribution (specific) by 5% (measurable, actionable, and realistic) in the next 12 months (timed).

But what did I mean by outputs and outcomes?

Outputs are the things you do regularly. You served meals to 100 people. But what did those outputs accomplish? What was the impact of your outputs? This is where outcomes come into play.

Outcomes are the result of your outputs. Those people that you served meals to—what was the result of those meals? Were they able to become food secure? Were they able to do better in school because they weren’t hungry? This is the wow factor of how what you do at your organization really is starting to change the world for the better.

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Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to start tracking the right information, so you know how you are progressing toward those goals. What do you need to track? Who is going to track it? Where?

Finally, you need to share your accomplishments and your impact! Let your supporters celebrate what you accomplished together. What about those missed goals? Those need to be shared, too, but with a plan on how you will use a missed goal to motivate your supporters.

Want to dive into making more impactful impact statements and unpack all the questions you need to answer when showing impact? Blackbaud University created the OBP: Fundraising—Impact workshop to walk you through the ins and outs of impact. Sign up today and join the impact conversation in the Organizational Best Practices Community here.

News Organizational Best Practices Blog 03/21/2019 2:09pm EDT

Added by Melissa Rancour

17 Comments

Aubrye Carr Jul '19

I'm late to the game on this as I finally have some down time to read through blogs, but this was great to take back to the team as we discussed our annual impact report and statement!

Sue Christensen Jul '19

Thanks for the insight!

Lisa Krause May '19

Thank you for a nice reminder!

Chris Whisenhunt Apr '19

What a great article!

Megan Perez MSA Apr '19

What a great post. I feel that my organization's mission statement clearly defines what we do; however, how we measure impact is reflected in the stories that we tell about how we have made a difference in our communities. We are constantly getting thank you notes telling us what non-profits were able to do with the money they received from our organization. We also see our impact in a lot of our end of grant reports. We are able to tell our story about how we make an impact in our community on our one-on-one conversations and have recently started utilizing social media more to reach even more people.

Kirsten Petersen Mar '19

This is a great article. Thank you for your insight on impact.

Christine Settles Mar '19

Great advice given succinctly! We use SMART for our annual conversations & expectation setting process and it's really useful to think about specific actions that we're going to take to achieve our goals for the year.

Jenna Anderson Mar '19

This such an important training as I still see confusion in funding proposals between outcomes vs outputs.

Karintha Marshall Mar '19

Appreciate the distinction between outputs and outcomes. Mentally I think it's easy to conflate the two, but explaining it this way illustrates that one is definitely better suited to for long term/strategic goal perspectives.

Thanks for sharing.

Amy Wieck Mar '19

Thank you for the great article! Each year we create a 1 sheet of brief descriptions of our outcomes. It is a great way to give our supporters a snap shot of our impact.

Adrienne Baumann Mar '19

Our Development Team is in the process of updating / re-creating our impact statement as well. Thanks for the tips!

Kelly Hogan Mar '19

I love the thought of thinking about our impact in terms of outputs and outcomes. Will have to bring this to my team to help us!

Jess Munroe Mar '19

Thank you for sharing this! We recently transitioned to SMART goals and reading your insight of what 'impact' truly means has really resonated and something I'm going to share with my team.

Lynn Jones Mar '19

Thanks for your insight on impact.

Sarah White Mar '19

Great dissection of how to create an effective impact report, thanks for sharing this!

Amanda Gerard Mar '19

We've been working on the impact of the fundraising we are doing! This is great information and I plan on bringing this up in our next Development Team meeting.

Stacie Dennis Mar '19

Such a great breakdown on how to truly define what "impact" we should be tracking. Thank you for sharing!