Impact means different things to different people. When considering the impact of your challenge, you may be talking about the greater social or environmental impact – for example, how many jobs have been created or how much CO2 has been reduced – or you may be referring to how your project measures up against your objectives.
It’s important that when measuring impact, you measure against what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, if your challenge objective was to support the launch of new social businesses, this is the area that should be analysed. If you try to measure the success of your challenge against your organisational objectives, then it will quickly become very complex and take up more resources than necessary.
In order to measure impact properly, you should look back at your objectives so that you can assess, for example:
the number of businesses created (you'll need to keep interviewing the business teams in question);
the number of people who joined a team (to measure how you expanded a team);
the number of active participants (to understand how far the challenge reach went);
and the number of people inspired to do something because of the challenge.
Your sponsor or funding partner may also want figures on the reach of the challenge for CSR purposes, so you may also want to report on the number of people who joined the challenge and the number of ideas created.
What method will you use?
To capture some of this data, you can use online surveys and personal interviews. If you don't have time to wait for impact surveys and don't need quantitative data, you can collect 3–5 impact stories by personally interviewing the challenge “winners” and/or a few super-users.
Below are the different sorts of survey that might come in handy at different stages.
Pre-challenge survey
If you use surveys, you want to check for a baseline – this is an average reading that allows you to see when there’s a big increase or decrease, and when a high figure is an average for that group rather than being out of the ordinary. In order to do this, make sure the following appears in your user-registration form:
How do you want to take part in the challenge?
To spread the word about the challenge/community
To give feedback to improve ideas
To submit an idea
To join the team as a staff member
To join the team as a volunteer
To learn about the challenge topic
To invest in an idea
To donate to an idea
Other
Post-challenge survey
After the challenge, you may want to capture a number of things: for example, how to improve the user-experience for your next challenge; where participants heard about the challenge (so you can learn where more marketing needs to take place); and, crucially, the impact the challenge has had on the participants. You can send the post-challenge survey to everyone, but we recommend you only send it to participants who’ve taken part in some way; a slightly different version should go out to idea-submitters.
There are some good free tools you can use for this, including Surveymonkey, Typeform and Wufoo. Your platform might also offer this function: for example, Crowdicity has a survey tool that you can make live at the end of a challenge.
It can be difficult to get participants to respond to a survey, so be sure to test it out on a few friends first to check it doesn't take more than five minutes to complete. Additionally, as most people tend to vote in the middle, try to keep an even number of rating options (eg, use 1–4 rather than 1–5 or 1–3). Click here for an example survey.
Here are some extra questions that could help you run the challenge better next time:
How did you hear about the challenge? Through a friend, in a newspaper, on social media, through Impact Hub (and so on)
On a scale of 1–4, how did you find using the challenge platform? 1 – difficult; 2 – a little difficult; 3 – easy; 4 – very easy
On a scale of 1–4, how easy/difficult was it to understand the milestones? 1 – I didn't understand what to do; 2 – I understood a little; 3 – I understood; 4 – it was very clear
You may also choose to survey those who didn’t submit ideas – if so, this would be a more simple survey, such as this.
NOTE: You can make surveys anonymous if you feel it would encourage participants to be more honest with their criticisms. However, we’d suggest asking for a respondent’s email address so that you can follow up with them if there are any big issues that arise.
A survey six months post-challenge
If you’re able to, you should send a follow-up survey to idea-submitters (those who were selected and happy to stay in touch) to ask them how their projects are developing. This could be a simple list of questions, including: how many team members they now have compared to when they took part in the challenge; whether they have continued to benefit from connections made and feedback from the challenge; and what area of impact their project is focusing on.
