Over the last number of months, the Humanli team has worked hard to understand best-practice in Social Impact and Social Value.
This journey has helped us better understand our implementation of the management, measurement and communication of real social impact. Our impact goal is to embed social impact management and best practice in our Humanli services for our Corporate Partners and Humanli Family Members.
As we continue to develop our social impact practice, we are growing our national and international networks of excellence with Social Value Ireland, Social Value International and Efiko Academy.
In this blog post, we share an overview of our current stage of embedding social impact best practice in our Humanli Services. There are four stages to maximising an organisation’s social impact. (1)
- Plan
- Do
- Access
- Revise
Humanli is currently specialising our services in the Planning Stage for real social impact, explicitly adopting the Theory of Change (ToC) social impact planning tool.
Theory of Change (2)
A theory of change allows Humanli to describe the needs of our Humanli Family Members and the social issues that they and our Corporate Partners are working to address.
We then use the finished Theory of Change as a one-page Impact Diagram that illustrates the process needed to overcome the needs or social problem your organisation would like to negate; this your impact goal.
The Impact Diagram tells a story from the perspective of your intended impact goal tracing you back to the current reality and the resources you have to overcome the problem.
The two most significant benefits of a theory of change are that it allows you to communicate the changes you want to make; these are your outcomes, and the activities you plan to implement to achieve your impact.
Like all Social Impact measurement and management practices- engaging your stakeholders should be the priority voice when creating your Theory of Change. Your stakeholders are the people and voices who are affected or affect your impact plan. Humanli helps you engage the many voices relevant to your impact plan, helping you see the problem from their perspective and to understand what matters to them.
If you would like to learn more about how Humanli can help your organisation, please get in touch.
References:
1 https://socialvalueuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/MaximiseYourImpact.24.10.17.pdf
2 https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/ten-steps/
