The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Mansfield Traquair Centre, 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BB.
Impact
Measuring the impact of your digital inclusion work has numerous benefits:
- Reporting back to your board/senior management team to ensure their continued support.
- Highlight the difference you’re making to the people you support.
- Understand and respond to the needs of your Digital Champions and wider workforce.
- Understand what is and what is not working – and make changes.
- Boost your comms with interesting stats and impactful stories.
- Sustaining momentum for digital inclusion work across the organisation.
- Completing a funding application additional resources or to try something new/different.
- Be part of a bigger community by sharing your work through Scotland's Digital Inclusion Charter.
Here are some of the ways we've seen projects demonstrate their impact.
Quantitative data is all about numbers and outputs. This helps demonstrate the reach of your work and how your resource is being used. Some key metrics you might capture include:
- Number of Digital Champions trained.
- Number of digital skills sessions delivered.
- Number of people supported.
- Number of devices gifted/loaned.
- Number of sim cards allocated/total amount of data gifted.
- Number of people reporting an increase in their own digital skills.
- Number of people reporting greater access to digital services.
- Number of people reporting positive outcomes (accessing education, saving money online, managing their health online).
While quantitative data can give you an outline of your activity, qualitative data is the added colour that tells a story. This is where you can really capture the impact and human side of your work.
Most of us are probably used to writing 'case studies', and this is a great way to tell a story, but we can make use of a range of methods to capture impact:
- Blogs: Writing a blog is a great way to take some time to reflect on your learning and share it with others. Blogs should be honest and not only speak about your successes, but also share things that haven’t gone so well or have posed a challenge. People respond to honesty and the lessons you have learnt could really help someone else overcome a similar challenge.
- Surveys: A survey can be used to capture useful insights to your work. You should give careful consideration to how you design your survey with lots of prompts and open questions. A survey can be an easy way to gather data fairly quickly and it gives the person completing it a structure to provide the information you’re looking for. You can create surveys for free on platforms like MS Forms, Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.
- Audio recordings: Not everyone can tell their stories in writing. Recording conversations can give you a more organic and honest account. How you use this is up to you (providing you’ve secured the appropriate consent). You could create podcasts like Simon Community Scotland.
- Video recordings: Conversations on Zoom or Teams can be a really effective way of capturing stories. You can come up with some prompt questions to guide your conversation, and it can always be edited later. Here’s an example from No.1 Befriending Agency for Connecting Scotland.
- Video case studies: A video can bring a story to life, and add authenticity as the viewer gets to see the person teel their story in their own words. here's an example of a video case study we used in Connecting Scotland.
- Animations: There are free versions of animation software like Biteable that you can use to tell your story. This is what we used in SCVO (paid version) to create our What is a Digital Motivator video.
- Webpage: You could have an intranet page, external facing webpage or a SharePoint site to showcase all your learning.