Impact Assessment

Welcome to Module 5: Impact Assessment - How to Measure and Manage Impact!

So, you’ve thought deeply about the what and the how of setting up your social business. But how will you know if you’re doing what you set out to achieve? What techniques should you use to course correct where necessary? In this module, you’ll learn about impact management, which answers these questions and more!

The course module on impact management aims to provide you with basic knowledge of how stakeholders in the social innovation space can evaluate the impact of social innovation initiatives. It will focus in particular on the needs of social innovators to measure their impact to understand if solutions are effective, of financial providers who are interested in social impact and therefore need impact measurement to decide what to fund, and of policymakers who must evaluate the impact of and adapt their policies to help the most impactful social innovations thrive.

You will be introduced to the basic concepts behind impact measurement, which are the Theory of Change and the I-O-O-I model. From there, you will learn how the data you collect can be used to make better decisions for social innovation and to increase overall impact.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you should have gained a basic understanding of:

how to write a Theory of Change for their social innovation initiative
what the casual linkages between activities, outputs, and outcomes are
how impact management can help increase the impact of social innovation.

Lectures

In this module’s lecture video, you will learn more about how to use a Theory of Change and the “I-O-O-I” model to analyze and communicate your impact to stakeholders.

We translated the lecture videos\' scripts into German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovak and Slovenian. In case you would like to have a look at the translated scripts, please see the files for downloading further down.

Lecture 1

Theory of Change and "I-O-O-I"-Model

Lecture playlist

Lecture 1

Theory of Change and "I-O-O-I"-Model

Play

Additional materials and transcripts

Infographic on Impact Assessment

That was a lot of material to cover! A helpful visual summary of the module will help you remember the key principals, main tools, and steps to implement what you have learned.

Impact Assessment_Infographic.pdf

Expert Interview with Prof. Barbara Scheck

Tool and Assignment

Now you try! Use this worksheet to help design a model Theory of Change based on the I-O-O-I model.

Impact Assessment_Tool.pdf Impact Assessment_Assignment.pdf

Additional Readings

That wraps up our unit on impact measurement.
The learning doesn’t end here though! Voluntary readings may serve to dive deeper into specific topics.
We’ve arranged them by subject for your convenience and encourage you to study them individually or discuss them here!

Quiz

Download Quiz Download Answers

Webinar: How do I capture and communicate impact?

Measuring (social) impact has never been a piece of cake. That’s why we invited a special guest from the Social Finance Academy: Maxime Cheng is an expert in Impact Measurement and Management. She will reveal to us the secrets of a well-done Theory of Change by providing some hands-on tips. During the webinar, we will focus on one of the biggest challenges of Impact Measurement, namely the difference between output and outcome, with the help of some real-life examples of social innovation initiatives.

The key questions which are addressed during the webinar are: