You need to know what you’re doing well and how you could improve when creating your positive change in the world. That way, you can show your investors, staff, funders and customers what difference you’re making, so they want to keep supporting you.

Many businesses track their activities and outputs, eg number of workshops run, products sold or customers served. Finding out the difference you make is about tracking what happened because of those activities (outcomes) and outputs. This tracking is sometimes called measuring your impact.

Keep track of what you’re doing, rather than relying on random feedback. You’ll need measures: markers or clues (sometimes called indicators). For example:

• If you run a course to help people get jobs (activity), you could record how many people attend your course (output) and how many of them get jobs (outcome).
• If you’re trying to improve people’s physical health, you could ask people how much fast food they eat in a week, what their blood pressure is or how much sleep they’re getting.

Decide which outcomes are most important to measure, then pick measures for those outcomes. An outcome is a positive change you want to make in people’s lives or for the planet. Measuring your outcomes helps you truly know what difference you’re making. Identify different measures for different outcomes.

Make measures specific, relevant and measurable

When you choose measures, make sure you’re measuring things that you have influenced directly. For example, if you run a course on getting jobs, the number of course participants who get jobs would be a direct measure, but the country’s unemployment rate would not be, since not everyone who wants a job will attend your course.

You don’t have to pick perfect measures from the start. You can change what and how you measure as your business and impact grow. Start with a few good measures, rather than a long list of measures you might struggle with.

Use measures that show the positive change you’re making (your outcomes). Having evidence that you are creating positive outcomes can persuade others to support your business, eg give you money or work for you.

Choose measures that meet the criteria below:

Specific

Be clear about what you’re measuring

Measurable

Make sure outcomes can really be measured or counted

Relevant

Relate each measure to an outcome you want to achieve

Timing

Decide when to measure

Positive

Focus on what you’re doing, instead of what you’re not doing

Focus on outcomes

Measure what’s happened because of what you’ve done, not what you did to achieve it

Explore others’ measures

Get inspired by looking at measures from other businesses that do good, especially if their purposes are similar to yours. Start by browsing their annual reports or impact reports.

Answer the questions below to identify and improve your measures. The number of measures depends on your impact model, but four or five is a good number to aim for.

The questions work like this:

• The results you choose in Question 1 will help you choose your measures in Question 2.
• The measures you choose in Question 2 will shape your answers to the remaining questions.
• You may get insights as you answer the remaining questions. If you want to change your answer to Question 2, go ahead, but check if you should change any other answers.

Developing your business and impact models

1. Choose outcomes to monitor

You could pick three or four priority outcomes: the most important outcomes in your impact model. These are the outcomes that show the change you’re making and if you’re doing a great job.

If you pick too many outcomes, measuring your impact can be complex and time consuming.

2. Choose your measures

For each outcome, pick one or two things that can show how well you're achieving that outcome.

Collect different types of information. Numbers can show the size of your change (eg number of people who get jobs after completing your course). Feedback can show the quality of your change (eg what participants say about what it meant to them to find a job).

Think about the details of what you’ll measure. For example, will you distinguish between people who choose to work part-time and people who work part-time because they cannot get full-time work?

3. Identify where you’ll get your information

You could get your staff to collect information about their everyday work. For example, you could ask your staff to record how many phone calls and texts they get or how many people they help.

Or you could survey people or research publicly available information. If you’ll measure something by asking someone a question, write the question you’ll ask and who you’ll ask. If you’ll be asking the question in a survey, record how people will answer (eg using a 5-point scale, free-text or multiple-choice answers).

However you get your information, think about these things:

• Is your source accurate and reliable? For example, if someone records something as it happens, the information will be more accurate than if you ask them later.
• How will you collect your information? For example, if you carry out an online survey, you’ll get many responses but less depth. Or you could carry out a phone survey, which is time consuming but allows you to dig into answers.
• How will you collect only specific and relevant information, and not more? For example, if you want to know what languages people speak, ask for languages, not ethnicity as well.
• How will you ensure that everyone gives you the same information? For example, if you want to know if people work full-time, say at least 35 hours a week.

4. Compare your information

Think about what you can compare your information with. If you’ll use information from another source, record that source here.

If someone else is collecting similar information to you and you could compare yours with theirs, write that down. For example, if you and another organisation both help people find work, see what their success rate is. If theirs is very different to yours, you might want to see what you’re doing or measuring differently.

5. Decide when you’ll measure

Write down how often you’ll gather this information. Collecting it should be:

• often enough that you can respond if something changes
• not so often that collecting information becomes impractical.

How often you collect information is especially important for surveys. If you survey too often, people may get tired of your surveys and stop responding.

If you have to allow time for something to work, think about how long that’s likely to be. For example, if you coach people on how to behave in job interviews, allow time for them to attend interviews before measuring the outcome.

6. Save your information

Record where you’ll save the information, so you can find it easily when you have to. Make sure the information is secure, especially if you save personal information.

Save the information you collect in a way that works for you and your team. What exactly you save depends on how you intend to use the information. Here are three options to think about. You can use them together or separately.