Social impact

What it is

Spending 10 000 EUR is not an impact. Delivering six websites is not either. Impact is what these websites change: an association that receives more volunteers, a social grocery better known in its neighbourhood, a grant application easier to defend, a family that finds help in ten seconds instead of ten phone calls. It is measured afterwards, on facts, and it is told by those who live it.

The three levels not to confuse

• The means: what was committed (euros, days, people)
• The outputs: what came out of it (websites delivered, people trained, pages published)
• The results: what changed for the publics, and how we know (visits, requests, registrations, testimonies)

Most reports stop at the second level and call it impact. The third requires waiting a few months and asking the associations questions: it is the only one that really interests a sponsor, a funder or a journalist.

How to describe it without overstating

1. Say what was done, with the exact figures
2. Say what came out of it, with links the reader can open
3. Say what changed, citing the source: a website statistic, a sentence from the association
4. Say what did not work, or not yet: that is what makes the rest credible
5. Never attribute to the project a change that has other causes

Examples of results

• A community centre receives its registration requests through the website instead of the phone, and gains a morning a week
• A social grocery appears on the query "food parcel" followed by its municipality's name, and sees families arrive who did not know it
• A youth club attaches its website to a grant application, and the funder understands the project without a meeting
• An association finds three volunteers through a form it did not have

In Kern4Good

The end-of-cohort report follows this structure: the euros and the days, the websites delivered, then the results reported by each association six months after going live, in its own words. This report serves sponsors (S section of ESG, CSR communication) and associations (activity report, grant applications). The article Measuring the visibility of asocialsponsoring proposes the dashboard; the Impact hub page explains why the programme exists.