During this time of disruption, it is important to bring as much humanity, flexibility, and clarity to your reporting requirements as possible while still collecting essential data to meet your core reporting and analysis needs.
At True Impact, we’ve developed some new tools to help. While these do not replace full social impact reporting, they can serve as important resources to gather immediate feedback and performance data. We call these tools “Rapid Response Reporting Tools”.
1. Nonprofit Needs Assessment Survey. In our recent blog post, we provided a complimentary Nonprofit Needs Assessment Survey. It’s a short and simple survey designed to help donors understand the emergent needs of their nonprofit partners, so they can adapt their resources (e.g., employee skills, in-kind goods and services, infrastructure) to help meet those needs.
2. Lite reporting. We also developed a “lite” reporting approach that captures essential information about the number of people served, and the types of services or resources provided. This tracking will help your partners to easily document the reach of your investment during emergencies, which can then be incorporated into a larger narrative (or “theory of change”) of intermediate and end outcomes.
3. Employee "Acts of Kindness" ROI Tracker. Social distancing has paused many traditional volunteer activities. However, simple “acts of kindness” -- typically, informal or ad hoc activities such as running errands for neighbors or watering their flowers, supporting online reading circles for kids, or increasing your support of local businesses -- are on the rise. Capturing and sharing these activities can inspire more of them by others, and meaningfully improve people's sense of wellbeing at a time when all of us could really use it. This brief survey can help you document these interactions.
Today’s challenging environment calls for modification of past practices, but that doesn’t mean giving up the data that enables you to manage and report on the social value you are generating. Consider adapting your current practices to identify current needs, exclude non-essential data collection, and even expand your reporting (but with a light touch!) to capture evolving forms of community investment.
If you’d like to learn more about our Rapid Response Reporting tools and approach and how it fits into full social impact reporting, please contact us.