What’s an Impact Report? What do we measure and why? Here is your answer

Our social impact report, which we just like to call impact report is getting published each year and it is our humble attempt to capture evidence on whether we make good on our promise - to make a difference and achieve our outcomes.

There is a difference between the process of supervising matches and client reviews - when what you inevitably have to ask: is this match going well? are we making a difference in this person’s life? - and measuring an organisation’s social impact. What’s the difference you ask? Well, for starters, a client review is based on an individual. Before a befriending match is set up, we ask each person, both volunteer and befriendee, what they would like to achieve with the match. Six months and then a year in to the match, we ask if the parties - both befriender and befriendee - have achieved what they thought they would with befriending. We, (meaning the Volunteer Coordinators who supervise this process) also try to suss out if anything could be going wrong that could lead to the breakdown of the match in the long term. There could be several reasons for that, and if anything is happening the Coordinators should be there to manage these issues and make everyone feel supported.

Now, the measurement of our social impact is much less straightforward. This process is about trying to find tendencies among all clients and volunteers as a whole. Given that we are a small organisation that works with a small pool of people, if we have just one or two people who were not positively affected by our involvement in their lives, it is going to show up in the data. It is a risk that we have to take. To devise a social impact measurement tool, we first had to look at our organisational outcomes. In other words, what we promised our funders and the society as a whole that we would achieve. Our outcomes are: reduced loneliness, increased confidence, increased skills and increased connections. How did we come up with these outcomes? Through looking at research around the world that pointed to the benefits of befriending.

‘Very well then’ you might say, ‘but how on earth can you measure something like loneliness or confidence?’ The answer is again by looking at research worldwide. Whatever you want to measure, chances are that you’re not the only one who is interested in how that particular outcome can be achieved. So we took the UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure loneliness, the New General Self-Efficacy Scale to measure confidence and skills and the WHO’s Quality of Life for Older People measurement tool to measure connectivity and social participation.

In short, this is how we have gone about trying to put to paper the impact our organisation makes among our befriendees. Of course, we also realise that numbers are a dry and uninteresting representation of this impact and are worthless without quotes and pictures and stories from the many people we work with.

“[Having a befriender] just helps me cope with life and certainly the lockdown. Makes me feel like I'm still alive, that I'm a person, that I matter.”

This is an example of a befriendee quote from our latest impact report that really helps to bring home the message that the support our volunteers give is really invaluable and makes a real difference.

There will never be an objective, scientific way of measuring how much we feel like we matter.

We are really proud of this report because of how much work the team has put in to it collectively. We all had some task or another to collate it all. And now YOU understand how and why it was done.

If you would like to have a wee read, you can find our latest Impact Report HERE.