Four Ways to Improve Your Impact Strategies in 2022
With a new year upon us, many are looking to make positive changes in the world by setting new goals within their companies, NGOs or non-profits. This year, instead of reporting simply because you have to, let’s commit to taking the time to understand what the data is really telling us in order to make change.
In order to do this, we need to care about whether we have been successful in the past. We also need to examine whether we are making progress at delivering the intended outcomes to the end-benefactor. Small tweaks to your existing impact and ESG strategies and processes can go a long way in 2022.
Whether your fiscal year-end was December 31 or if it’s coming up soon, fiscal turnovers mean new strategies, tweaking existing ones, and striving to implement what we learned from the previous year to make the next one better. Wondering how to get started? At Riddl, we’ve come up with four key ways to improve your impact strategies from the previous years. These include:
- Test Outcomes
Review the raw data for themes and identify new outcomes, whether unexpected or emergent, and start tracking these outcomes along with the outcomes from your original strategy. Test your outcomes to see whether your strategy can be refined
2. Question the Status Quo
Question if the outcomes you delivered in 2021 are valid or if they shifted this year. It’s possible that after delivering a program or activity for a long time that the outcomes shift, you start to see long-term outcomes emerge, or that some outcomes are no longer present. External or environmental trends can affect this.
3. Weekly Progress Meetings
Many of us collect data for reporting periods. Try adding progress updates on your data and different check-in times to get a sense of how you are performing at delivering impact. These can be a weekly meeting or even a bi-weekly meeting, to get a sense of performance. This allows you to make program and activity changes and respond to the needs of end-benefactors more quickly, while also being innovative in your approach. As organizations, we usually have weekly performance check-ins on other KPIs, like sales, marketing, and products. Let’s make 2022 the year we add impact weekly check-ins to our schedules.
4. Go Beyond the Reporting
Reporting provides a point-in-time data point, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us the change that’s been made over time. Measuring the impact can start as simply as understanding the difference between the baseline of when you started to knowing how far you have come — and that’s real change. Let’s start to normalize reporting the change made versus the quarterly data metrics, which is out of context and carries little meaning.
Working together to refine our impact strategies, we can become better change-makers and solve the world’s toughest social and environmental challenges in 2022. Let’s get to work.
today to learn more about how Riddl can help your organization have a greater impact in our world this year.
Originally published at https://riddl-tech.medium.com on January 27, 2022.
