Business Lab

View Original

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

See this content in the original post

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


Sign up for the Movement Makers newsletter

Sign up to our fortnightly newsletter and get the insights, tools and powerful whakaaro from people transforming how they collaborate with their community.


Send us a question or recommend a guest

Do you have a question about how to move beyond consultation? You can leave us a voice message here for us to share and discuss with a future guest. You can also send us a guest recommendation to us at info@businesslab.co.nz.


Subscribe to the show

The Beyond Consultation Podcast will help you to do more than just tick the box of consultation. It’s the podcast for purpose-driven professionals who want to increase their collective impact.

You'll hear stories of people working together on challenges that no single person or organisation can address on its own. You'll hear about the mindsets, the methods, the failures, and the lessons learned - all with the goal of increasing the collective impact you're making in your work.

Subscribe below on your favourite platform or to receive email notifications when a new episode is uploads to the cloud: