Your activities create a range of impacts on your community, some of which are positive and some negative. By first identifying these impacts ? then measuring them ? you can begin to maximise the benefits of your positive impacts and at the same time, lessen your negative impacts.
Furthermore, if you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then measuring impact is a worthwhile exercise for you.
Do you want to?
1. Improve current work and learn how to teach others how to measure in order to support the work that they do?
2. Learn how to measure sports related activities?
3. Increase understanding of how activities lead to impact?
By measuring your impact, you can then begin to prove and improve on these. Impacts are the things that happen to your users, members and community ? your stakeholders ? as a result of your activities.
Stakeholder definition
?Those people or groups who are either affected by or who can affect the activities of an organisation?
(Pearce, 2001)
Furthermore, the ?dialogue? or ?narrative? that can come out of the process of measuring impact is useful for demonstrating these to another valuable stakeholder group ? funders. By using the right methods and tools, you can demonstrate these impacts effectively.
There is currently a variety of tools available to enable you to assess the quality and impact of your activities. Briefly, these are Social Accounting and Audit (SAA), Local Multiplier 3 (LM3) and Social Return on Investment (SROI).
Click
here for a table of some of these tools with descriptions.
As a lead in to these tools, Impact Maps are very useful as they allow you to think logically about the things that lead to your impacts. Through this process, you will be able to develop indicators of impact we you can then measure using the previous tools mentioned above.
This section of the Sports Kitbag will provide information and the necessary tools to develop your own Impact Map through a ?story board?. Following on from this there will also be a range of tools available with descriptions as to how and when to use them.
The Impact Map lays down a very good foundation and leads nicely into some of these tools. It will also provide a list of ?indicators? (impacts) that a social enterprise providing sports and physical activity may wish to measure (or indeed, identify new ones).
Some of these tools have been developed from, ?proving and improving: a quality and impact toolkit for social enterprise? website (www.proveandimprove.org) and ?Proving & Improving Toolkit? (nef, Social Enterprise Partnership, 2005).