Should we bother? Measuring our Impact

Our 2001-11 Impact Survey:

More than ever, in the current economic and political climate, evidence of impact is a top priority for everyone. That's why we're launching a 3 minute impact survey .

With education and young people measuring impact is a huge challenge because there’s no clear agreement about what our intended purpose is. How can we agree on what the best way of doing ‘x’ is, if we can’t agree what we want ‘x’ to achieve? This formed the basis of Laura McInerney’s last blog, Ladders, Stairways and Sieves. 

Given that LKMco is firmly in the stairway camp, one might have thought that measuring our impact would be easy, particularly given that it’s an area we frequently advise schools and other organisations on. Yet it’s a challenge that has caused me no end of sleepless nights. Most people only know a small part of the work we do- the bit that’s most relevant to them. For education geeks and policy wonks it might be our topical blogs and tweets, for classroom teachers it might be our mentoring and observations. For senior manager  it might be strategic improvement planning, for youth organisations like the National Youth Agency it might be our support in developing new programs for young people. Meanwhile academics probably most benefit from our research and publications. So what links them all together and how can we measure our impact in what might initially seem disparate areas?

That’s what this new statement of “Raison d’etre” seeks to show.

The idea here is that we know what we want society to be like and we think we know what steps will move things in that direction. Having worked that out, all we need to do is measure how well we’re doing at taking those steps. That’s why we’ve launched an impact survey to do that.

This is an incredibly important exercise because it tells us what we’re doing well and what we need to improve on. More than that though, it tells us whether it’s worth us doing the things we do: I spend a huge amount of time reading reports or attending events and disseminating the findings. Should I bother? Do you get anything out of it? I’m convinced that Laura’s blog writing is fantastic and fascinating. But should she bother? Do you get anything out of it?

We’ve already had some great feedback from some of our clients but given that it’s society as a whole we want to impact on and that you are part of that (and in many cases have significant influence over it), we want to hear how we’ve affected you. It may not be the most entertaining exercise but if you feel you’ve got anything out of what LKMco does, we would hugely appreciate it if you’d spend 3 minutes filling in this survey. Then we can decide whether to carry on. I assure you- we will be very grateful for whatever feedback you give us.

So, please spend follow this link and leave us your thoughts

Many thanks and have a great Christmas,

Loic Menzies

Director, LKMco