In my previous post I wrote about the increasing importance of measuring impact and how new technologies could support this. This post goes back to the practice of measuring impact and the methodologies for doing so.
Five members of the CLEAR VILLAGE team, myself included, just completed the +Acumen “Making Sense of Social Impact” course. The course, taken by people all around the world, included four weeks of workshop sessions and homework around four central concepts of impact measuring: defining breadth of impact, depth of impact, checking focus on the poor and creating a data collection plan. These steps form the methodology +Acumen uses to assess the impact of the companies they invest in.
Besides studying the impact of example organisations, we had to work on our own ‘impact challenge’. We chose to focus on the Walled Garden education programme we have been commissioned by Havering Council to run this summer. Over five weeks children aged 8-12 will come to the garden for lessons and activities to help them learn about growing and preparing healthy food.
Most of the course content was fairly new to most of us so there were lots of aha-moments. For example, Acumen’s focus on the household level in measuring the depth of impact was very insightful, i.e. what changes does a project/product/ programme bring to a household? For the Walled Garden Summer Programme, the change we want to see is families eating more fruit and vegetables, increasing their enjoyment of food preparation, trying new foods and enjoying sharing meals with others.
Acumen uses the Progress out of Poverty-indicators (www.progressoutofpoverty.org) to measure if they are in fact reaching your target group. Although we did see the value of these indicators in the context of impact investment for poverty reduction, we concluded that, in the case of the Summer Programme, these indicators are not very useful for us. Though in this first iteration we are focusing on Harold Hill, a deprived area in Havering where obesity prevalence among reception year children is high, the Summer Programme is open to all.
For our data collection plan, the topic of module 4, we discussed measuring children’s vegetable and fruit consumption, as well as food habits (such as having dinner around a table and preparing dinner instead of ordering a take-away) throughout the six weeks of the programme. In terms of collection methodology, the plan includes diaries for parents and children, a method that ensures that our beneficiaries are actively involved in data collection.
As we disseminate the lessons learned to all CLEAR VILLAGE staff, we are making impact analysis more central to CLEAR VILLAGE’s project planning. Over the summer we will be solidifying our monitoring and evaluation strategies for our Small Works programme as well as our East London Waterways project.