We ran a workshop in February to explore do-able ways for organisations to record and report on the social impacts that they have.
We believe that this will be increasingly important as they move from serving one large customer (such as a local Council) to serving an increasing number of individual customers. It will also be important to record and report on impacts of new, innovative approaches to helping people to live independently.
There are many approaches to social impact reporting. Through the Personalisation Made in Bradford Network, we would like to encourage people to explore the following ideas
- A simple approach to social impact reporting based on identifying desired social outcomes, then agreeing outcome indicators which help to show progress towards achievement of outcomes.
- Development of a bank of social outcomes, where organisations with the co-operation of funders and commissioners agree a number of broad outcomes which they are all aiming to achieve. Indicators are then developed and each organisation chooses to use indicators which are appropriate to them. Such an approach can help to avoid each organisation struggling to do this in isolation. It can also encourage comparison of information, and information can be shared to show the collective impact of the sector.
- Alongside this, we would like to encourage organisations to form social impact circles where small groups of organisations come together to support each other and hold each other to account on their social impact reporting. The aim here is to avoid the need for expensive outside support.
Organisations which came to the DIY Social Impact Reporting workshop expressed a keen interest in developing the above approaches further. We hope that we can do this through the Personalistion Made in Bradford Network.
