Social impact can be measured by the social return on investment tools by collecting various metrics, such as whether your activity meets the SDG (social development goals) criteria. K. Anoschkin, together with her colleagues and most of the Finnish organizations use the “Impact chain” tool for impact measurement. This system is the basis for many other measurement method systems.
“If you are a mission-driven organization and want to change the world for the better, perhaps you also want to know whether you are succeeding. The impact is a measurable positive change in the prioritized problem of your target group. It is always a change in people’s behaviour or life situation,” says Katja.
“Impact chain” is an impact modelling and management tool which helps you define what effect you are trying to achieve and how you are going to do it. Impact chain consists of 7 building blocks. First, you detect the problem you are tackling and (second) set your long-term impact vision. Third, you define objectives or the concrete changes which will lead to the achievement of the vision. Then you define the necessary resources and activities that are needed in this journey towards it. Lastly, you define measurable outcomes and impact, for example, how will society benefit from this problem being solved.
Know the root causes – this boosts your chances to solve the problem
K. Anoschkin explains that sometimes people get so preoccupied with their ideas and are so convinced those ideas work that they forget to check if it really is the case.
“There’s a possibility that your solution does not make any change or your activities are counterproductive. That’s why measurement is so important,” says the impact measurement expert.
Moreover, the process of impact measurement always helps understand the activities of an organization or a social business better. It provides insights into whether you need partnerships to expand your activities.
“We never choose the metrics before we set the goal. The goal is the big change you want to make. Also the impact – it is the change you want to make in the society or the environment,” says the representative of ARVO.
Keep in mind that if you want to measure something you have to set your starting point. What is the current situation? Why does it need a solution and what problem are you going to solve with your activity? According to Katja, it is also essential to understand your target group (in the case of social business these are usually the beneficiaries), know who they are and assess what their current situation is.
“Then you identify the root causes of the problem and consequences – what will happen if nothing changes? When you know the root causes, you also know how to solve this problem. So your outcome metrics come from there. Then you count the resources you have and actions you are planning to take,” advises K. Anoschkin.
Assessment of impact takes time but could help function without extra funding
The impact value chain helps see the causal links between problems, solutions and outcomes more clearly. When this chain is put together on paper, it reveals what should be measured. But it may happen so that after going through all of the steps you have to repeat them once again. Because, according to Katja Anoschkin, the impact is always related to the problem. If you see a positive impact, you plan a broader range of your actions, if no impact – you have to plan changes in what you do.
“It can take anything from 6 months to up to two years to notice the impact. In one of our employment programs, we have predicted how many people would get a job and keep it, for example, two years after the program would have ended. The resources you are using, the activities you are carrying out – all of this is important but that is not impact. And a common mistake is when people confuse those things,” says Anoschkin.
She is now the program manager in social impact accelerator “Impact startup”. Anoschkin is helping companies which tackle unemployment problems in trying to find solutions for better inclusion of the disabled, immigrants and the youth into the labour market. Similar initiatives take place in all the Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Every year different topics are chosen and different companies are invited to participate. As mentioned, this year the topic was unemployment issues, next year it is going to be the issues of children and young people.
“Measuring impact also helps to connect the business and the particular impact it creates and to live without the extra funding. It makes your organization economically sustainable,” Anoschkin adds.
Success story: the government was convinced after a few months of measuring
Katja mentions the “SOS Children’s village” in Finland as a good example.
“In one particular municipality, there was a huge increase in child custody cases. The “SOS Children’s village” cooperated with the municipality and analyzed the data on families from previous years. They found out that families received no help during the early stages of problems first occurring. Also, the services which were being provided did not improve the well-being of families. As a result, these problems accumulated,” said K. Anoschkin.
The issue is that if a certain family does not receive any help on relatively small issues, 6 years later they will need many more services and finally child custody becomes inevitable. So “SOS Children village” started several pilot projects where they constantly kept in touch with a number of families and tried to find out what kind of services exactly they needed.
This way the organization has created a completely new service and hired a few “family partners” in order to offer help at the very early stage when problems first occur. It was soon noticed that the well-being of these families has improved and the need for the “heavy” social services in the long-run has decreased. The Municipality noticed that too. As a result, this service is now scaled to many municipalities and funded in the form of Social Impact Bond. In other words, sufficient evidence of the effectiveness of the program has attracted interest from municipalities and also among the impact investors.
K. Anoschkin adds that impact measurement is a long-term and step-by-step process: the first step is to model your impact using an impact chain, the second step is to continuously verify impact through metrics and data collection. The third step is the evaluation and development of operations based on the data collected.
Finnish Association for Social Enterprises (ARVO) was one of the partners in the project Nordplus “Education for smart development of social entrepreneurship”. During this project, Katja
Anoschkin shared her experience in impact measurement with colleagues from Lithuanian non-governmental organization “Good will” and representatives of Vilnius university, so as with
Estonian Social Enterprise Network.
