Using Tiny Tools to Measure your Impact

As a mom, wife, daughter, sister and friend, I spend a lot of my time caring for others. Taking care of loved ones, while sometimes challenging, brings me joy and fulfillment.

I’m sure you spend a lot of your time, both personally and professionally caring for others. We do this because we want to help. And while we know that our help is often appreciated and beneficial, it would be nice to have objective data that illustrates the tangible results of our efforts.

I work with several nonprofits to help measure client satisfaction and gather information about the usefulness and impact of the services provided. While surveys, interviews and focus groups are all effective ways to gather data, a variety of other more participatory and engaging techniques can also be used such as “Tiny Tools” ((https://tools4dev.org/resources/tiny-tools-impact-assessment-tool-review).

Gather a group of community members who participate in your programs and services either virtually or in-person and engage them in actively describing the programs they participate in and the helpfulness of those programs and services. Some examples include:

 Activity List: Community members list all the activities being run by your organization in their area. They then rate activities based on their importance, who benefited, and how much time and effort they put into the activities.

 Influence Matrix:  Community members list the areas of their lives that have changed (e.g. health, income, skills, food security, etc.) down one side of the table. On the other side of the table, they list the activities of the program. They then rate on a scale from 0 to 10 how much each activity has influenced each part of their lives.

These and other data collection efforts can help you better understand how your work has impacted those you serve. If you want to learn more about how you can measure how you care and how caring works, feel free to contact me. I love helping people and organizations understand their impact!