Defining and describing impact is critical to the success of nonprofits and foundations. Only by laying out clear goals, identifying core strategies, demonstrating measurable results, and learning from their efforts can organizations advance their missions in significant ways.  Effectively communicating plans for and progress toward an intended impact can generate meaningful partnerships and collaborations and build support from donors, volunteers and other stakeholders.   

Charting Impact will help nonprofits and foundations across the country advance their missions by more effectively communicating the value of their work to external stakeholders.  A joint project of Independent Sector, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and GuideStar USA, Inc., this new initiative provides organizations a common framework and a language for conveying their efforts to achieve lasting, meaningful change.  Charting Impact is designed so that organizations of all sizes and missions can use its approaches, even though their specific goals and strategies differ.

This initiative focuses on five simple but powerful questions about an organization’s intended impact.  Together they connect near-term objectives and results with long-term goals and strategies. These questions are:

1. What are we trying to accomplish?
2. What are our strategies for getting there?
3. What are our organization’s capabilities for doing this?
4. How will we know if we are making progress?
5. What have and haven’t we accomplished so far?

Answering all five will create a succinct report that helps both individual nonprofits and foundations and the sector as a whole. Individual organizations will benefit from crystallizing, both for themselves and for their stakeholders, the connection between the important results of their everyday work and their larger goals for lasting, meaningful impact. At the same time, by creating a community of organizations that are actively communicating their plans and progress to constituents, donors, partners, and other stakeholders, each organization can integrate its work into a larger landscape of our sector’s efforts to improve lives and build communities.

Since early 2009, we have worked with an advisory group of IS members to develop and test this framework. We are now conducting a pilot test to assess the applicability and value of the five core questions to a larger, more diverse set of organizations.

Independent Sector previously promoted effectiveness in the nonprofit sector by focusing on how foundations and nonprofit organizations can work together to achieve successful outcomes. For more information on the Building Value Together initiative, click here.