impactworks@sociocapital.org   |   (+234) 807 880 0180

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Evidence-Driven Insights For Sustained Impact

ImpactWorks helps organizations generate, measure and manage the right evidence and insights to enable sound decision-making targeted at delivering measurable blended value and driving scalable change.

Two important trends are shaping the future of development in Africa.

  • First, there is an expansion of innovative and blended capital with an appetite for measurement of both social and economic impact.
  • Second, public, private, and social sector organizations are increasingly attuned to deploying evidence and real-time insights to make their programs and investments more effective, adaptive, and strategically responsive to changing development landscapes and investment priorities.

Social Impact is the new buzzword in business and development. But how can organisations really measure, monitor, and manage them?

While organizations are excited by how they can use data to show how they achieve their bottom line (social, financial, or environmental), there is more they can do with evidence to solve problems, spur innovation and deepen their value.
This is where the Sociocapital ImpactWorks come in.

ABOUT US

ImpactWorks is a social impact monitoring, measurement and learning practice supporting organizations to apply data, evidence, and insights to enable sound decision-making and deliver measurable blended value.

We apply our deep understanding of business systems, social impact performance modelling, metrics and analytics to transform impact data into market intelligence and actionable insights.

We help measure, monitor, model and manage the process, results and outcome of social development initiatives and investments to inform strategic decision making & thought leadership, sustain and scale high-impact models, and improve performance, visibility, and learning.

Core Service Areas:

– Landscape Analysis & Impact Modeling
– Market, Implementation & Outcomes Research
– Monitoring, Evaluation & Adaptive Learning
– Impact Reporting and Communication

An agile, adaptable, and context-specific impact measurement and management (IMM) approach is key to effective investment, business, and programmatic decision-making.

Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) is often seen as an intimidating field that is complex, lengthy, and costly and the exclusive domain of academia and donor reporting requirements.

This is based on the following assumptions:

Impact measurement is inherently multi-dimensional and complex.

While there seems to be a growing appreciation of Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) within the social impact landscape, the capacity for designing and building a culture of IMM is grossly lacking.

While conventional business metrics are relevant to understanding market dynamics and growth opportunities, they are insufficient to measure social impact.

What you Gain by Partnering with ImpactWorksTM

Understanding how YOUR ORGANISATION create long-term value by using evidence to unpack the interconnectedness of broader economic, social, and environmental issues.

01

Understand the impact of your initiatives and business processes on people and society.

Benefit from a credible, comparable, and adaptable approach to social impact measurement that incorporates social performance alongside financial and environmental performance. This is essential to helping your organization truly understand the drivers of sustainable growth and estimate how those drivers translate to impact.

02

Receive the clarity, insights, and tools required to authenticate your contributions toward the SDGs and Social Good

Achieving the SDGs is critical to creating long-term value for the internal (organizations) and external stakeholders (people and the planet). Position your organization to recognize how you contribute positively to sustainable development.

03

Unpack the value they create for society and for their business beyond financial returns.

Incorporating impact reporting standards within your program design and implementation plans elevates the social and economic development impact of investment and projects. Build the confidence of your investors, donors, and stakeholders that you can deliver outsized impact at scale.

OUR SOLUTION

We partner with funders (philanthropies and investors), implementers and businesses to apply sustainability intelligence, impact reporting standards and performance parameters to monitor, measure and manage social, environmental, and financial value.
We do this by:
IMM Systems Strengthening

Working with organizations who desire to develop and deploy tailor-made IMM systems so they can effectively understand and increase the impact of their products, programs, and practices.

We do so by embedding impact management and standards into impact models and balanced thought leadership adapted for the local context, macroeconomic factors, and sector-specific priorities.

Formative Research

Helping to bring focus to the existing tools, habits, and relationships we can support design, implementation and scale-up.

We do so by making qualitative data tangible; creating themes and insights based on patterns of behaviour, then making them generative with frameworks and relevant hypotheses; and sharing findings through engaging and inspirational visuals that help teams act.

Management and Advisory

Providing end-to-end IMM management and advisory services informed by evidence and balanced thought leadership adapted for the local context, macroeconomic factors, and sector-specific priorities.

Impact Assessment and Reporting

Helping organizations communicate with a common impact performance language thereby alleviates the reporting burden on both investors/donors and investee/grantee organizations, and in turn, enhances data interoperability.

We provide continuous, on-the-ground, on-demand, cross-sectoral and systematic support to funders and implementing partners (IPs) through performance monitoring, impact and performance evaluations, project and activity level monitoring, evaluation and learning plans.

Impact Benchmarking

Facilitating organizational adaptation and alignment of their specific blended value parameters with relevant metrics and standards so they can better describe and understand the impact, assess success, and clearly communicate impact performance with other impact investing stakeholders.

Some of these standards include Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Impact Standards, Social Investment cases, and Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS), amongst others.

Organizational Development & Learning

Delivering tailormade capacity strengthening, organizational learning, special studies and knowledge management support.

We build the capacity of your in-house staff to deploy relevant tools to monitor, manage and measure progress and outcome.

OUR APPROACH

The principles and practice of impact management from the two far-reaching spectrums of business and development are similar in principle but markedly different in practice.

We implement a robust impact measurement framework to assess progress, identify levers of change, as well as understand the economic and social return on social interventions and mission-focused investment. We ensure that these impact considerations are intentionally integrated into the enterprise development and investment lifecycle.

We do so at 3 levels:

  • ensuring that development actions and investments lead to improved business and social outcomes.
  • using results to inform and supplant assumptions as policies and initiatives are prioritized, designed, and deployed.
  • stimulating learning for future program design and implementation.
ImpactWorks by Sociocapital
 impactworks@sociocapital.org   |   partner@sociocapital.org   |   (+234) 807 880 0180   |   708 681 0000