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Ep 46 - Understanding Impact Is Not Just About Data, with Maria English

Business Lab
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Introducing Maria English

Impact is an intriguing word, isn’t it?

And you may face lots of challenges with trying to figure out your organisation’s impact.

For smaller organisations, impact assessment is a “nice to do”. Costly. Time-consuming. Overwhelming. And so we rely on our hunches.

Larger organisations face different challenges. Sometimes the measures we set up become the targets themselves and blind us to other possibilities. Or you have so much data and you become overwhelmed.

Maria English is the CEO of Impact Lab - a social enterprise aiming to tackle the challenge of how we measure impact and communicate it to others. Impact Lab has two services. GoodMeasure is for service providers. GoodInvestor is for funders.

If you’re putting impact assessment into the ‘too hard basket, this episode will change your perspective on data and impact evaluation for good.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

  • Impact measurement is not really about getting more or better data

  • Where to start with impact measurement - and that there’s no such thing as perfect

  • That impact measurement is not a one-off thing - it’s a learning process to help decisions ‘today’ that will improve what you do ‘tomorrow’

  • How to shift from a cost mindset to a value mindset in your approach to impact measurement.

Resources mentioned in this episode

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