Six steps to building the social investment market

Yesterday, NPC conducted an experiment. We convened a roundtable with about 30 social investment experts, including Iona Joy (NPC), Nick O’Donohoe (Big Society Capital), Adrian Brown (Boston Consulting Group), and Danyal Sattar (Esmee Fairbairn). We asked them where social investment is going.

Is social investment about to take off or crash dive? Are the current social investment lenders the vanguard of a global revolution in financing? Or are they inflating a financial bubble that promises much and delivers little?

We did not get a single conclusive answer, but we did get some very intelligent responses. By the end of the discussion, I felt we had a ‘big picture’ view of where social investment is, where it is going, and the barriers it faces. In short, we came away with the big issues we need to resolve if social investment is to work for society in the UK.

Here is my attempt at a summary of the discussion:

• We need to sort out the plumbing before we turn on the taps: In other words, we need to make sure regulation, legal structures and tax structures encourage, or at least don’t create barriers to, social investing. We all agreed that CC14 (the new Charity Commission guidance) was useful. However, our legal categories (charity, company) are too binary for social investment, which is about creating social returns but doesn’t care if that is achieved by a business, a charity, or a social enterprise. Plus the FSA is largely ignoring social investment, leaving it to operate (to some extent) in a regulatory vacuum.
• We need to expand the lending infrastructure. When Big Society Capital starts lending later this year, there is a risk that it will overwhelm the relatively limited pool of current intermediaries, who make social investments. There are around a dozen national and several dozen local intermediaries. If they don’t have the capacity to lend the money, there is a risk it takes a very long time to reach the organisations it is supposed to finance.
• We need more dedicated ‘salesmen’. If social investment is to grow into a ‘market’, there needs to be a constantly growing pool of investors putting in money. At present, there is a trickle of grant-makers and high net worth individuals pitching in £100,000 here or £50,000 there. To achieve a jump in scale, we need ‘dedicated capital raisers’, or salesmen. They would talk to investors to understand their needs, provide data on social investment products (eg, historic performance), and then pitch for investment. ‘This groundwork is not being done at the moment‘, one of yesterday’s participants commented. But it needs to be done if the market is to grow.
• We need to build a pipeline of investment ready charities and social enterprises. ‘Social investment’ is on the lips of pretty much every charity chief executive I’ve met in recent weeks. Its gone viral. A huge amount of work is needed to turn this buzz into actual deals. Social investment won’t be appropriate for many charities or social enterprises – the minnows, the ones with unstable income, the ones without assets are all unlikely to be candidates. We need to provide guidance to help them realise this. We then need to support those for whom it might be appropriate to get ‘investment ready.’ This could mean anything from a training session for a finance director, to consulting work to restructure their business model. We need a greater range of investment readiness support out there, and more of it.
• Government needs to make sure commissioning supports the sector to take on social investment. To take on social investment organisations need a strong revenue stream. Government is one of the main sources of revenue to the social sector, but the government is cutting back. Plus, as contract sizes grow, fewer appear to be going to charities and social enterprises. If these trends (cuts and larger contracts) continue, many will have access to a growing pool of capital, but a shrinking pool of revenue. They’ll be like someone on minimum wage with a massive overdraft limit. If government made contracts more accessible to charities and social enterprises this would massively help social investment take off.
• We need more consensus on measuring social returns. We need more consensus about how to assess and report on the ‘social return’ created by investments. A single measure of social return is probably a step too far. More ‘shared measurement‘ – agreement on how to measure impact in fields like homelessness or mental health – is probably the best way forward. We all agreed that reporting requirements need to be proportionate to the size of the organisation and the investment. However, there was also a recognition that not all investors are as interested as they could (or perhaps should) be.

So there is a huge amount of market building to do if social investment is to fulfil its potential to revolutionise financing in the social sector. No-one in the room underestimated the task ahead. But there was a sense of cautious optimism that a lot could be achieved if we moved together in the same direction.

NPC is running several half-day workshops for charities on an introduction to social investment – visit our website to find out more and sign up.

Read more about our social investment roundtable in blogs by NPC’s Head of Charity Effectiveness Iona Joy for Alliance and Chief Executive Dan Corry for the Guardian.

Early intervention, mentors and spin doctors: Learning from last summer’s riots

Gracia McGrath OBE is Chief Executive of Chance UK. Chance UK is an early intervention organisation that prevents crime and anti-social behaviour by matching mentors to 5-11 year old children with behavioural difficulties. The mentors deliver an intensive and individually tailored programme for each child, which builds their confidence and self esteem. Yesterday Gracia presented to a roundtable of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, and here she gives us her thoughts on that discussion. 

In the 6 months since the summer riots Chance UK have been asked 1000 times what the causes were, but only 3 times what solutions there are. It was with this in mind that I was delighted that the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel asked me to present at, and take part in their roundtable. I also felt that their focus on building resilience and looking for ways to develop a positive mindset was a good starting point for discussion.

As a solution-focused organisation Chance UK concentrates on how we might do things better in the future, and keep the hand wringing and navel gazing to a minimum. But I guess a little time is required to look at the causes of the riots.

From the perspective of the children we work with at Chance UK, the first thing that strikes you is the lack of aspiration in both a mental and literal sense. How do you get an idea of ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ if you don’t know anyone who works? How do you know what your city looks like, never mind what opportunities might be out there for you if you have never been outside your estate?

There has been a lot of argument on how much influence gangs played in the organisation of the riots, and nobody seems to agree on this. I think that question is not relevant. In an area where gangs are prevalent (and that encompasses all the areas where there were riots) what we see is a general erosion of acceptable behaviour, and a high tolerance of violence and criminal activity. Gang leaders may make very bad role models but what happens when they are the only ones on offer?  This makes a community more tolerant or at least more afraid to challenge what has become the status quo in some areas. They are also more likely to accept the kind of reckless violence and criminality we saw last summer.

One statistic we haven’t heard enough about is that one third of all those 10-17 year olds arrested in the riots had been permanently excluded from school in the last year. This figure may be very much higher when you look at the number of ‘unofficial’ exclusions that are now so common, as schools struggle to meet unrealistic targets.

All of these causes boil down to one thing: that people do not feel they have a stake in their own community and therefore are looking for an alternative societal or family group. Today at the roundtable I heard a number of examples of places that didn’t get looted or burned. Places like Hackney Empire, right in the firing line but so embedded in the community that rioters did not attack it.

So how do we deal with these issues in order to ensure that this does not become a regular part of our social landscape?

Firstly we need to be working with children at a very young age. We need to address issues as they start to show themselves, when it is relatively cheap (in comparison to repairing destroyed communities and paying for more prison places) and easy to do so. We need support for children in primary or secondary schools to prevent them getting excluded and losing out on all the educational opportunities others enjoy. We need support for families that are struggling and  this means not closing family centres and Sure Start programmes that have proved successful. We need to maintain services that can engage the most hard-to-reach families rather that weighing up the cost per head and deciding it is too expensive to do so.

We also need to ensure positive role models, within families and communities, are able to show children a future that includes them, and a way to access it. This has to include a move to ensure that fathers are encouraged to stay involved with their children both practically and legally. A lot has been said about positive male role models for boys, but girls also need a positive male role model and this has largely been ignored.

I know it probably isn’t popular to say it, but there are some very bright people running gangs, and if their skills of leadership and influence could be harnessed for good then we have some ready-made mentors out there. And what of mentors? Chance UK has 17 years experience of matching adult volunteer mentors with primary age children and has proved how beneficial they can be in helping a child find a more positive way of finding the attention they so desperately need. But there is a presumption that mentoring is easy, cheap and can’t really do any harm, and it is definitely none of those things. All the research shows that mentoring programmes with robust structures that are time-limited, goal-oriented with clear adherence to the model have very beneficial outcomes for the majority of children.

Finally I would like to see more positive child and youth role models represented in the media. Young people who are celebrated for educational and sporting successes, or for their engagement in their own communities. At present children and young people are represented in the media only as ‘hoodies’, gangsters and criminals. The only other young people represented are x-factor winners and soap stars and many of them are not very well behaved. Of course, all of this sells papers but we know where a concentration on that gets us! I would like to take a leaf out of Tony Blair’s book and hire ourselves a spin doctor to get good stories about children and young people in the media. It will serve to show that you don’t have to wait until you are an adult to be a good role model… Alastair Campbell, what are you up to these days?

One hundred days at NPC

In his first 100 days in office, Roosevelt passed legislation to tackle the Great Depression, JFK set a path to a promised new Jerusalem, and Obama began to overhaul US foreign and fiscal policy.

On the other hand in the new Danish political drama, Borgen, the new PM discussed what she would do for her first 100 days and much to the dismay of her spin doctor she decided to visit Greenland.

I guess my first 100 days at NPC have been a bit less dramatic (although none of us are quite sure what the charity sector equivalent of Greenland is).

Mainly I have been learning and discovering—and starting to move NPC onto a fresh trajectory, building on its core competences of rigour, impact and independence, but facing up to the issues that are key to the success of the sector going forward.

It has been a pleasure to meet so many very impressive and dedicated individuals, from those involved in funding to those at the sharp end of front-line delivery and everyone else in between. I have found a lot of energy and determination even in times that everyone knows are tough. And I have found a wealth of variety even in organisations that look similar from the outside.

But what has left me pondering most is how change and progress is achieved in this sector. The problem, as everyone knows, is that outside the text book model of the perfect market—where better, more innovative firms producing good products continually replace  less good ones producing things nobody wants—driving positive, progressive change is hard.

This kind of change is not easy to achieve even in the private sector where a whole host of market failures mean that the model often doesn’t work. It is tougher still in the public sector, a sector I spent many years in, where prices and profits do not drive decision making and where the classic drivers of innovation and productivity like new entry and exit work rather weakly, if at all.

Much of this is replicated in the not for profit and social sector, but with even more bells and whistles. The motivations are all good, but the mission-driven approach sometimes acts not as a spur but a barrier to progress.

The original NPC model hoped that change would be driven exclusively by driving funding towards the best players. Thus a sort of quasi-market would develop. This agenda is one we still believe in, but we are realistic on the extent and pace at which it can achieve results. The same impetus lies behind things like social impact bonds, where the idea is that payment by results combined with risk capital will drive people and funds towards interventions that work.

But perhaps one of the most important things I have re-learned in my first 100 days is that, just as in public services, much improvement and positive change is driven by organisations wanting to feel they are doing a good job vis-a-vis their peers—as well as supporting their beneficiaries—and not only by a search for rewards for being good. Head teachers care as much about their ofsted results from a sense of professional pride as they do because they think it will influence parents choosing where to send their child to school. In the same way, charities should and do care about their impact because they want to know how their work is changing the lives of the people they aim to help, and whether they are doing it better than others, just as much as for the funding opportunities it may bring.

What does all that tell me? First, that NPC’s focus on helping funders and providers understand their impact and how to measure it must remain core to any theory of change for the whole sector. But second, that as a charity dedicated to helping the sector do more with its resources, NPC needs to operate in a variety of areas that can help enable and inspire improvement and modernisation.

That is why we will be doing more in my next 100 days on social investment. It is why we will soon be conducting research into the way that commissioning is affecting charities. And it is why in addition to all our consultancy work we are getting people in the sector together to discuss key issues through our new series of seminars.

Not quite a Kennedy 100 days impact maybe, but some important shifts of emphasis that will keep NPC relevant and on our toes.

What could your charity do with the cost of a royal yacht?

If you’ve been on twitter or seen the news in the last couple of days, you can’t have escaped the controversy surrounding Michael Gove’s royal yacht proposal. David Cameron has been quick to quash rumours that the yacht would be paid for from the public purse, clarifying that it would in fact be paid for by private donations. These include £10m from financial leaders in Canada and £5m from an unnamed private donor.

One thing that strikes me about this story is how quickly two major donors have stepped up to the mark and offered vast sums of money towards the cost of the yacht—the plan for which was only revealed over the weekend.

I find this particularly interesting in the context of Coutts’ recently published Million Pound Donor Report, researched and written by Dr Beth Breeze at the University of Kent. The most recent report looks at gifts made in 2009/10 over £1m, the really high end of UK philanthropists. The report finds that the number of these million-pound-plus sums being given to charity has dropped, which is hardly surprising in a difficult economic climate. In the previous year, 201 donations were given, to a total value of £1.548bn, while in 2009/10 there were 174, with a total value of £1.312bn. But it also struck me how the number of large donations is relatively small anyway, and equally how focused it is on particular causes—with higher education (43 million-pound donors), international development (25) and arts and culture (21) far more popular than, say, human services and welfare (5).

Perhaps we should be heartened by the fact that high-net worth donors can still afford to dig deep and stump up millions for what they consider to be a good cause. Or perhaps this is another chance to debate the morality of charitable giving, and whether some causes are more worthy or ‘better’ than others. It’s a thorny issue, as no one likes to be told where to give their money. But I can think of a long list of causes which I would consider more ‘worthy’ to donate to than a royal yacht.

The guardian have responded to the yacht saga with a great interactive graphic showing what you could buy for the price of a royal yacht, mainly focused on public services. More than 3,000 ambulance staff, over 51,000 free travel passes… the list goes on. Another way to look at it is this: it costs Samaritans £1500 per hour to run its service across the UK and Ireland. £60m would keep them going for 40,000 hours—that’s 1,666 days, or 4.5 years.

I’d be interested to know, if any of our readers have figures to hand, what impact your charity could make with that £60m? Answers in the comments please!

Blue Monday doesn’t add up

Pundits are arguing today over which day is Blue Monday. Is today the most depressing day of the year or is it in fact next Monday?

The dubious formula behind the day looks like this:

[W + (D-d) x Tq]
______________
 M x Na

where W = weather, d = Debt, T = time since Christmas, Q = time since failing our new year resolutions, M = low motivational levels and Na the feeling of a need to take action.

I agree with Dr Dean Burnett, who poured scorn on the idea in The Guardian today. Burnett criticises the pseudoscience of Blue Monday and argues that the concept is ‘disrespectful to those who suffer from genuine depression… who often face an uphill struggle being taken seriously, especially as “depression” is such a general term.’

Of course it is ridiculous to suggest that a predetermined set of external factors could trigger depression in an entire population one Monday. However, the idea of upacking a wide-ranging concept like “well-being” (or the lack of it) into its component parts seems to me to be a sensible one.

This is something NPC has been pursuing through the development of its Well-being Measure. An online survey tool designed for 11- to 16-year olds, the Well-being Measure enables charities and schools to ask the young people they work with how they feel about their lives. The survey explores eight different aspects of well-being:

1. self-esteem
2. emotional well-being
3. resilience
4. satisfaction with friends
5. satisfaction with family
6. satisfaction with community
7. satisfaction with school
8. life satisfaction

The Well-being Measure is one of the tools and approaches that will be explored in an upcoming half day event that NPC and Third Sector are putting on at the end of the month.

I doubt that speakers will be sharing any  neat formulae at Measuring soft outcomes: How to demonstrate improved services and prove value to funders. But I’m sure there will be fascinating insights and practical tips about how different charities have approached the challenge of understanding and demonstrating the soft outcomes of their services.

• To find out more and sign up click here (you’ll need to be quick as there aren’t many places left).

Social policy kitemark: A Nice idea?

It is very good to see that my former Downing Street colleague Jeremy Heywood, now Cabinet Secretary, is very clued up and excited about the possibilities that outcome payments could make to solving some of our major social problems. (See this article in The Guardian).

As I know from experience, if the top civil servant says that something is important  then the whole civil service will react: expect to see every permanent secretary quickly grilling their team to find out what they are doing in this area.

Jeremy goes further and ponders on whether we would make more progress if there was a body that could tell us which interventions work – to solve issues like reoffending or drug addiction  – and which do not. If we had a kitemark for good interventions would that not attract more investment of all types into the successful ones? And what about developing a social policy equivalent to the medical advisory body, Nice?

This is an idea we thoroughly support. The whole point of NPC is making sure beneficiaries get more help and that means we try and make sure that money is better spent, that resource flows to the better organisations and interventions that work, that organisations doing OK are motivated to do better. So the concept of separating the wheat from the chaff is very tempting and we should  all consider it.

But as ever, a new approach comes with problems and can be over-hyped. Designing an intervention that works for all prisoners, in all areas, at all times may be searching for the holy grail. We for instance work with organisations who help children with mental health issues and they find that the way they need to shape their activity is different from school to school and from year to year depending on local circumstance, economic issues and the like. So sometimes the kitemark we want is about good charities that are learning and adapting rather than backing a particular intervention.

The places where the government has gone big on payment by results so far is the Work Programme and the inability to handle risk and cash flow has meant that demonstrably effective voluntary sector providers have been badly squeezed in a way that I suspect nobody intended. Would a kitemark have helped them there?

Further,  as Sir Jeremy points out, if we go down the road of payment by results then someone still has to pay. If we have found the perfect, kitemarked intervention then we should surely just fund it – and since government money is always cheaper to raise than private, the government should arguably just pay for it. Social impact bonds don’t totally alter that logic.

But these are all issues to keep in mind as we go forward. The basic idea that it’s helpful for charities to measure what outcomes they are achieving and how cost effective it is – be it with government money or donations from philanthropists or ordinary donors – is one that should be pursued. If we could find a good acronym for a new institution to do it, even better.

2012: A year like no other for charities

Sometimes, as we look into a new year, the crystal ball is cloudy and hard to read. But for the charity sector the future in 2012 is all too clear and it’s tough, tough, tough.

Despite this depressing outlook, there are things to be optimistic about. I have spent the last eight weeks while easing into my new job as Chief Exec of NPC, meeting many, many dedicated people in the sector. I’ve met charities, big and small and in all sorts of sectors; charitable foundations and philanthropists; government and quasi government (like the Big Lottery and Big Society Capital). And I don’t see a group of people who are about to give up and go home. They will do everything they can to keep delivering the best service they can.

But it’s true that the chips are down right now.

We know that the demand for charities’ service will increase. By exactly how much is in the lap of the consumer, the credit rating agencies the politicians and those elusive ‘animal spirits’ (take your pick). Whatever they do, unemployment seems set to rise in 2012 and poverty to increase. At the same time public funding will continue to be tight—and councils will be really making the pips squeak. The infamous ‘squeezed middle’ will be hurting as real incomes continue to fall, so we will do well to see public donations keeping up.

We know too that charities are going to have to adapt to new worlds of outcomes-based commissioning and of a localism that means that you need local knowledge as every council and community commissioner behaves differently. We know that there will be charities closing down and many forced into mergers. We know that trustees will be being asked to step up to the mark and that charitable foundations and philanthropists will be asked to bear a greater burden.

Opportunity or threat?

At NPC in the last six months we’ve seen a spike in demand from both charities and funders who are looking for our help to find their way through these difficult times. I have also heard about the perfect storm that charities face—with rising demand, lower income and tougher terms for contracts—in my numerous meetings in the last months. So there’s no doubt that 2012 will bring unprecedented challenges for charities.

All of this is hard. And yet. And yet it really does bring opportunity. This will be no time for marginal change: charities are going to have to really think hard about how they deliver for their beneficiaries. Old ways will need to be questioned, new business approaches brought in, different financing options embraced, partnerships sought like never before.  These are all areas that we can and will work with the sector to develop over the coming months.

So maybe we did not get the Christmas presents we really wanted. But we have to play with the toys (or gifts) we received. And we have to get on with it.

Happy New Year!

2011: SIAA, Social investment and measuring happiness

2011 has been a jam-packed year for the charity sector. There have been plenty of challenges, with many charities facing uncertain futures as funding dwindles. But there have been many positive and creative responses to the changes the sector is experiencing too, which we have seen amongst our clients and other charities we have worked with.

And at NPC we’ve had a few big developments of our own. Among the many reports we have published, events we’ve held, articles we’ve written and speeches we’ve made, a few things in particular stand out.

We helped launched the Social Impact Analysts Association
Together with Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Addessium Foundation, NPC has been working since 2009 to establish a new professional body to connect and support social impact analysts worldwide. This year, the organisation finally came into being, and started accepting its first members. In December, the Social Impact Analysts (SIA) Association officially launched in London with a conference attended by people from around the world who share a passion for social impact analysis. You can see videos from the day and read about what was discussed and the future of SIAA on their website.

We’re talking about social investment
This is a relatively new area for us, but one which we are keen to learn more about and help charities to understand how it could help them be more effective. We had a fantastic response to our guide for charities, Best to borrow, which aims to help them decide whether social investment is right for them. Social investment seems to be the buzzword of the moment, and while we don’t want to sing its praises too much (after all, it is just one of many funding options available, and it does have to be paid back!) we think it has a lot to offer the sector when used appropriately, and could help some charities in the face of funding cuts from traditional sources. 

We’re helping you to measure well-being
This year we were also very proud to launch our Well-being Measure, an online tool which uses a questionnaire to help charities measure their impact on the well-being of the 11-16 year olds they work with. We’ve already got a host of charities and schools signed up and using it, and we’ve had some great feedback. We hope the tool can help charities to prove the worth of the intangible outcomes they achieve. Find out more on the Well-being Measure website, or come to Third Sector’s Soft Outcomes Event and hear Well-being Measure founder John Copps explain more.

Last but not least, we’d like to thank all of you for reading our blogs, downloading our reports, coming to our events and sharing your views about what we’re up to. We hope all our readers have a wonderful Christmas, and a happy new year—see you in 2012! 

Christmas appeals, statistics and stories

Christmas is fast approaching, and the UK’s media giants are rolling out their charity appeals. The latest one to catch my eye is ITV’s ‘Text Santa’, inviting viewers to text in and pledge an amount to support one of nine chosen charities, including Samaritans, Help the Hospices, and WRVS, amongst others. Charitable giving at Christmas is as much of a tradition as stuffing and Brussels sprouts: from Scrooge’s gifts to the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol to Crisis at Christmas. Reminding people caught up in a glut of Christmas shopping to spare a thought, and some cash, for those less fortunate at Christmas is an old idea, but campaigns by the likes of ITV, Radio 4, and the Times do it very well.

One thing which has struck me in the various appeals is what charities can learn from these media organisations in their day-to-day communications. There’s a mantra we have here at NPC which it seems is shared by many of the journalists writing pieces about the charities their appeals support. Numbers are important, but alone are not enough—you need personal anecdotes to give them colour and meaning. Similarly, individual stories, however heart-rending, lack context without a solid grounding in figures. Put simply, our philosophy is ‘no stats without stories, no stories without stats’.

For charities, this could be a helpful phrase to bear in mind while communicating how their work changes people’s lives. You need the numbers to tell people about the context of your work, and the scale of the impact you are having. But just as important are the stories of the people you help, and the changes you make to places you work in. Without these, the numbers lose their meaning, and vice versa. One without the other gives an incomplete picture of your work—but used together they can communicate your impact very effectively.

Many of the Christmas appeals I’ve seen this year successfully combine their stats and their stories. Some of these campaigns are run by big newspapers, used to producing hard-hitting journalism, exposing stories of hardship and managing to convey the troubles people face through a personal story backed up by numbers. Charities could gain much from using this approach for inspiration when talking about their impact.

This year, NPC once again worked with the Guardian and Observer on their Christmas appeal, which focuses on disadvantaged young people. You can read the stats and stories which prove their chosen charities make a difference on their website.

There should be no I in Impact

Impact without an ‘I’ would, granted, be a lot harder to pronounce. ‘Mpact’ sounds like a late nineties R&B group, not the difference the social sector makes to society. However, more consensus and collaboration would make it much easier to assess impact. That is the fundamental message of the Inspiring impact report, launched today by NPC and Views, and with the endorsement of almost two dozen organisations.

Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to get better at measuring the social sector’s impact. And yet, very few of us seem to agree on how exactly the sector should measure. At the moment, very few charities or social enterprises measure their impact in the same way; even those that work in the same field (eg, mental health) or intervention (eg, counselling). With each organisation developing their own approach, a lot end up reinventing the wheel rather than building on existing approaches. You could forgive them for feeling confused, given they have to pick from thousands of different methods. All this makes assessing your impact feel like a pretty hard slog for charities and social enterprises. And with so many different ways of assessing impact, the data is rarely comparable, making it near-impossible for funders to target resources on the most effective interventions. This means data is not used nearly as often as it should be…. making all this data-collecting feel like a bit of a waste of time. Given the significant costs and (seemingly) unclear benefits, chief execs of charities and social enterprises would be forgiven for asking ”why bother?”

The question is: what’s going wrong? The answer is: not enough collaboration. Too much ‘I’ and not enough ‘we.’ And the fault lies not mainly with frontline organisations but with the organisations that are supposed to support them to assess their impact; including NPC. These organisations-consultants, think tanks, academics-have spent the last decade working largely in isolation to help the social sector measure its impact. The result is complexity and confusion for the organisations we’re supposed to help.

That’s why 30 leaders in the field of social impact measurement, including NPC, got together on 23rd September. We agreed that there are currently too many different ways of measuring, analysing and reporting impact data, and this is leading to duplication and wasted effort. We also agreed it is still too hard and costly for organisations to measure their impact to a high standard. We agreed that we need to work together more if we’re going to overcome these issues. During discussions we came up with five long-term goals:

• Embedding a focus on impact into the leadership and culture of thousands of charities and social enterprises.
• Adopting shared methods across certain fields (such as mental health) and key interventions (such as counselling).
• Making it easier and cheaper for charities to measure their impact by providing appropriate, affordable, and accessible data, tools and systems.
• Funders, commissioners and investors supporting a focus on impact and incentivising impact-based approaches in organisations they fund.
• Creating an effective network of support, linked to shared measurement approaches and following best practice, so that most organisations know of and use support where needed.

If we achieve these goals, it will be easier to do impact measurement to a high standard, and the resulting data will be more useful. In short, impact measurement would be ‘working’ a lot better than it does today.

We’re not going to achieve these goals without a big collective effort. That’s why twelve organisations have agreed to put in some hard graft through the ‘Inspiring Impact Group.’  At NPC, we hope that this group will show just what collaboration can achieve for the sector, and its beneficiaries.

In the impact measurement field, we’ve spent too much time working in isolation. Let’s make sure the next ten years is all about collaboration. By working together ’we’ can achieve a lot more than ‘I’.