You're striving for social impact. How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your problem-solving initiatives?

Defining goals with the SMART framework provides clarity and direction for any initiative. Specific, measurable objectives turn abstract missions into actionable plans, ensuring everyone understands the target. Without clear goals, you lack the benchmarks needed to track progress or celebrate success, making it hard to stay motivated or adjust course effectively.

In social impact work, defining clear goals is crucial. Your goals must be aligned with your mission and measurable. At The Cookie Project, we defined success by not only focusing on employment opportunities for people with disabilities but also ensuring long-term workplace inclusion. We also measure how we live our 3 values - Inclusion, World-Class, and Whanaungatanga (Belonging in Māori), by asking our disabled bakers and volunteers at least once a month. This clarity helped us measure progress and adjust strategies as needed.

Eu faço a seguinte reflexão. Você está realmente impactando a sociedade com suas iniciativas, ou apenas seguindo um roteiro? Como você sabe se suas soluções estão resolvendo os problemas reais e fazendo a diferença que você pretende? É fácil se perder em boas intenções, mas a verdadeira eficácia vem da capacidade de avaliar e ajustar suas estratégias com base em resultados concretos e feedback genuíno. Será que você está pronto para enfrentar a verdade sobre o impacto real do seu trabalho e fazer as mudanças necessárias para atingir seus objetivos? Para avaliação...

Measuring outcomes is essential to gauge your initiative's success and impact. Defining clear outcomes, like the number of individuals with improved reading skills, allows you to track progress towards your goals. Combining qualitative methods, like interviews and surveys, with quantitative data ensures a well-rounded understanding of your impact, revealing both the numbers and the personal stories behind them. This balanced approach provides valuable insights for continuous improvement.

To truly understand the results of your work, measure both tangible and intangible outcomes. For example, we measured the number of disabled individuals employed, but we also captured their personal growth stories, financial independence, happiness and community acceptance, offering a full picture of the social impact.

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Establish clear, specific metrics aligned with your goals from the start. Use both qualitative and quantitative data to capture the full scope of impact. Implement baseline assessments to compare progress over time. Regularly gather data through surveys, interviews, or observations to monitor changes. Engage stakeholders in the evaluation process to ensure insights reflect diverse perspectives. Analyze data to assess whether initiatives meet objectives, and use findings to improve strategies. Transparency in reporting outcomes enhances accountability and trust, fostering continuous improvement.

Assessing impact means examining not just the immediate outcomes but the lasting effects on the community or issue. It's about ensuring your efforts lead to sustainable, systemic changes—like planting a tree that grows and nourishes the ecosystem. This requires long-term tracking and awareness of unintended consequences, ensuring that the changes you implement are meaningful, resilient, and beneficial over time.

It’s important to evaluate how lasting and sustainable your initiatives are. At The Cookie Project, our impact assessment extended beyond employment—we looked at how it shifted societal attitudes towards disability (especially from the perspective of able bodied volunteers) and how the project influenced other organisations to adopt inclusive hiring practices.

Impact is the significant change or effect resulting from an action / intervention. How do you assess impact? First, define clear, outcome-focused objectives at the outset. Use a combination of qualitative & quantitative methods, such as surveys, interviews, case studies, and statistical analyses, to gather comprehensive data. Then, establish baselines for comparison and employ control groups if possible to determine causality. Engage stakeholders to ensure that evaluation criteria are relevant and inclusive. Regularly review and interpret data to measure progress against intended goals. Last, but not the least, communicate! Report findings transparently and use them to adapt and refine strategies, enhancing ongoing and future initiatives.

It is crucial to set baseline measurements for comparison purposes and, when feasible, to utilize control groups to ascertain causality. Involving stakeholders in the evaluation process is vital to ensure that the criteria used are both relevant and inclusive. This collaborative approach not only enriches the evaluation but also fosters a sense of ownership among those involved.

Engage stakeholders early by conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups tailored to their roles and experiences. Create open communication channels like suggestion boxes or online platforms for continuous input. Ensure questions are clear and relevant to encourage detailed responses. Prioritize inclusivity to capture diverse perspectives and address language or accessibility barriers. Analyze feedback promptly to identify trends and areas for improvement. Share results with participants to validate their input and demonstrate commitment to transparency and collaboration. Use insights to refine and enhance initiatives.

Regularly gathering feedback from the people you're helping ensures your project stays relevant. In our case, we listened to feedback from both our employees with disabilities and the organisations we partnered with, which enabled us to fine-tune our operations and maintain a positive workplace culture.

Social impact is about continuous improvement. At The Cookie Project, we iterated our operations based on learnings from each milestone. For instance, after feedback on workload challenges, we adjusted schedules to better support our employees, making our processes more inclusive and sustainable. Our packaging includes simple low cost tech innovation such as personalised QR code to enable real persona traceability and customer learning about the bakers and their disabilities.

Partnerships allowed us to scale faster and more effectively. We partnered with disability organisations to better understand the needs of the communities we aimed to serve, which helped us shape our programs more effectively. Ensure partnerships align with your mission and are based on mutual value creation. We capped our partners at 15, and review them on annual basis.