Evidencing impact

Below, you will find a range of different techniques and frameworks you can use to show the impact of your community group. In addition, these tools should help you to plan, review and improve your work so that it achieves the best outcomes for your community. There are also some links to further support.

Tools
Title	Summary	Link
Alliance for Useful Evidence	The Alliance for Useful Evidence has some useful resources in its publications section, such as The Challenges of Evidence and What Counts as Good Evidence?	More

The Code of Good Impact Practice	Inspiring Impact's 'cycle of impact practice' takes you through planning, collecting and use of evidence.	More

Contribution Analysis	This approach has recently been explored by the Scottish Government and involves carefully weighing up the different ‘contributions’ towards a particular outcome to assess the impact of a policy or initiative. The belief is that considering other possible factors addresses the problem of ‘attribution’ – when direct causal links are difficult to establish.	More

Evidence Finder	The Scottish Governmnet's evidence finder allows you to find evidence that the government has collected across a wide range of policy areas.	More

Evidence for Success: The guide to getting evidence and using it	Produced by the Knowledge Translation Network, this guide offers easy to follow, step-by-step guidance and resources to support organisations to use evidence to influence policy and practice.	More

Evidence for Success: Collaborating with academics	Following on from the orginal Evidence for Success (above), this guide is for anyone in the third sector, including community groups, who wants to link to academics to generate and/or use evidence to improve policy and practice.	More

Exploring your impact	An organisation called Making Local Food Work has developed these practical tools to help community food and other projects identify and measure the impact they have on the communities they work with.	More

Exploring the use of economic evidence to support the health improvement contribution of the third sector	NHS Health Scotland briefing on collecting economic evidence. Useful in terms of providing an introduction to gathering and presenting economic evidence.	More

How good is our third sector organisation?	This is a new resource currently being piloted by Education Scotland which has been developed to assist third sector organisations to carry out their own self-evaluation more effectively.	More

Inspiring Impact	Inspiring Impact, an international collaborative programme, has developed a range of resources to help you measure your impact, including a self-assessment tool called Measuring Up, as well as the Impact Hub where you can search for other useful evaluation tools.	More

Logic Model	Diagram showing the links between needs and short and long term outcomes. Evaluation Support Scotland has produced this useful introductory guide.	More

Outcomes Star	An evidence-based tool for measuring and supporting change.	More

Prove it	This is a straightforward website or toolkit developed by the New Economics Foundation which aims to help you evaluate your community project.	More

Proving and Improving	This website from the New Economics Foundation provides comprehensive advice, guides and tools for helping third sector organisations prove and improve their quality and impact.	More

The SROI guide	SROI stands for Social Return on Investment and is a method of estimating the finacial value of your work. This free resource sets out a step by step approach to completing an analysis of social return.	More

Social Audit Network	SAN delivers training and events around social accounting and auditing - an approach which shows the social, health and environmental benefits of an organisation's work and can be externally vallidated by SAN's network of Social Auditors.	More

Social Impact Scotland	This website provides tools and materials for understanding, measuring and demonstarting social impact. It includes guidance on social return on investment (SROI), theory of change and social accounting.	More

Social Value UK	Social Value UK is the national network for anyone interested in social value and social impact.	More

Tailor Made	This resource from the Community Development Foundation provides an overview of the valuable contribution the community sector makes to people’s lives and society as a whole. It combines qualitative examples with quantitative data, including economic impact, to make a case for the community sector. Might be useful in making a case for further resources and also to give ideas on how to present evidence.	More

Theory of Change	Like a logic model, a theory of change is a visual map which shows the route taken from initial activities of a piece of work through to intermediate outcomes and finally to long-term outcomes.	More