Skip to content

Sport and physical activity can make a big difference to people’s lives. It can benefit their physical and mental health, personal and social development, feelings about their local area, skills, employment opportunities and much more. 

Community organisations often measure their success by the results they achieve or how they perform in competitions, rather than the impact they have on their people and their local community. If you’ve ever wondered what these wider benefits might be or how to go about measuring them, read on! 

What do we mean by impact?

The term 'impact' is used to describe the short, medium and long-term effects that your organisation can have on its members, participants, workforce (both paid and voluntary), local community, and partners like sponsors or funding agencies.

A woman throws a ball during a game of petanque, while three fellow players watch on.

What type of impact can your organisation have?

Community organisations can have lots of positive effects on their participants, volunteers and local community, including:

  • Improving people’s physical health by providing opportunities for them to be regularly active.
  • Improving people’s mental wellbeing by enhancing their self-confidence, improving their mood, and reducing levels of anxiety and depression.
  • Reducing isolation and loneliness by providing positive opportunities for people to come together and socialise. 
  • Better community cohesion by bringing together different parts of a community together. 
  • Enhancing people’s skills and experiences by offering volunteering opportunities and helping to develop people’s communication and leadership skills.
  • Wider community impact by engaging people in positive activities that reduce levels of anti-social behaviour.
  • Boosting the local economy by encouraging people to spend money in their local area, hosting events and competitions. 
  • Reducing their environmental impact by becoming more environmentally sustainable.

Women celebrating with high fives

Why measure your impact?

If you don’t measure the full extent of your organisation’s impact, you’re unlikely to be able to demonstrate how successful you are and understand the difference you make. Measuring your impact can help you: 

Evidence your success
Being able to demonstrate the impact and value your organisation has on an individual or community can help you to promote or explain your work, attract new participants, volunteers, sponsors and other partner organisations.
Support funding applications and encourage sponsorship deals
Evidencing the impact and benefits of your organisation on individuals and your local community can help support funding applications and encourage new or renewed sponsorship deals. Having this additional insight can provide funders and sponsors with extra confidence that what you’re offering makes a difference and will provide a good return for their investment.
Develop your offer by learning from insight
You can understand and learn from any unintended, positive or negative things and make changes for the better. By regularly asking people how you’re doing you can understand what they think and identify different ways to continuously improve your offer.
Celebrate and shout about your success
Having a clear understanding of your impact will help you celebrate and shout its success and the difference it makes to people’s lives. This can help set you aside from other organisations and can support your efforts to attract new people, partnerships and investment.

How to measure your impact

There are lots of different ways to measure the impact you have. We’ve outlined these in five steps: 

  • Step 1 – Decide what to measure by when

    Understanding what you’re trying to achieve and the impact you want to have is important: it’ll help you collect the right information. 

    Be sure to think about your purpose, overall aims, short and longer-term objectives, your capacity to collect and analyse insight and when you want to do this by.

     Hide

  • Step 2 – Agree your collection methods

    Once you’ve agreed what you want to measure, you’ll need to decide on how you’re going to do this. 

    Data collection often fits into two categories: quantitative and qualitative methods.

    Collecting quantitative data often focuses on measuring numbers. It can help you answer questions like ‘how many’ and ‘how often’ and can be used to track changes over time. To collect quantitative data, you could use:

    • Simple surveys or questionnaires.
    • Membership forms and numbers. 
    • Attendance registers or visitor numbers.
    • Satisfaction scores. 
    • Feedback forms.
    • Website visits or social media engagement levels. 
    • Volunteer recruitment forms.

    Collecting qualitative information can help you to demonstrate the effects you’re having that can’t be captured by using numbers. It can help you understand and explain things like people feelings and find out more about their experiences, behaviours, opinions or ideas.

    Qualitative measures allow you to collect more detailed information, to tell a story or give context to things. To collect qualitative information, you could:

    • Carry out interviews or focus groups.
    • Collect anecdotal evidence such as online reviews, videos, emails, comments via social media, or in person feedback.
    • Write case studies.
    • Note down observations from meetings.
    • Ask people to share extracts of their diaries.

    To gain a deeper understanding of your impact, you can use a number of these different methods to capture both quantitative and qualitative insight.
     

     Hide

  • Step 3 – Collecting insight

    The next step is to collect the insight. To plan out when and how you’ll do this, make sure you’ve got enough people to help and ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities. 

    Depending on the methods you decide to use, you might need to promote what you’re doing to gain people’s interest and buy-in. 

    Think about how your people prefer to be communicated with, you might want to try a mixture of emails, social media channels, posters, leaflets, newsletters or set up some opportunities to engage people face-to-face, over the phone, or through virtual meetings. 

    Before collecting any data be sure people understand what you’re doing, why, and how their information will collected, stored and used. It’s important to get their consent to participate. Before you start, check that the way you intend to collect and store people’s data meets data protection and GDPR regulations. 

    There are lots of tools that you can use to help you collect information, including: 

    • Our Your Views guide – this provides some questions that can to help you to create a questionnaire or survey.
    • Sport England’s MOVES tool – this can help you to calculate the impact and value of your activities on people’s health. 
    • Sport England’s social value of sport and physical activity tool. This tool gives a monetary value to the wider wellbeing benefits of regularly participating in, and volunteering to support, physical activity and sport. 
     Hide

  • Step 4 – Review the insight

    Once you’ve collected the insight, you’ll need to review it to find out what it’s telling you. 

    This can be done in a few different ways and will depend on the methods you’ve used. For example, if you’re using online survey software, the software itself may complete some of the analysis for you.

    If not, find some willing volunteers to dedicate some time to pull out and collate the key findings; using spreadsheets can often help with this.

    If you’ve opted for collecting qualitative data, it’s likely that you’ll need to read everything through, pick out the key themes and messages and decide on any quotes or anecdotes that can help you evidence them. 

     Hide

  • Step 5 – Share your impact

    Be proud and celebrate the impact your organisation’s having! Share the key findings with the people that took part, your partners and the wider community. 

    Adding a summary of your impact into your annual report or accounts, putting it on your website and social channels or including it in your marketing materials can be a good ways to share your findings.

    Creating a presentation or collection of case studies can also be a helpful way of showcasing what you’ve achieved and can help to support your funding efforts and discussions with sponsors.

     Hide

Top tips for measuring impact

Use existing information

Often the easiest way to collect information is to start with what you have. You’ve probably already got lots of information that can help you demonstrate your impact. 

Make engagement interesting

Be creative in getting people involved. Think through your options like getting people’s views by asking them to put balls in different buckets, using sticky stars, or asking people to write on sticky-notes and put them up on a board. 

Pick a variety of methods

Using both qualitative and quantitative measures is beneficial. Information from different sources will help you to gain greater insights.

Plan ahead

Make sure you factor in the time and resources needed to measure your impact and gather a team of willing volunteers to help you. 

Look after people’s data

Be sure you know how to safely store and analyse the information you collect, especially if contains people’s personal data.

Be clear

Know what you’re going to do with the information you collect and who you’ll share it with. Have a clear plan about how you’re going to share your findings with your people, partners, stakeholders and funders when it’s ready to ensure everyone knows what a great job you’re doing. 

Use your insight to meet people’s needs

Collecting people’s views and opinions can highlight opportunities to do things differently. Be open to new ideas about how to make your offer even better. 

Celebrate

Shout about and celebrate your impacts internally and externally. 

Find out more

For further advice, guidance and information on measuring your impact and collecting data, check out StreetGames' Monitoring and Evaluation Kit Bag.

StreetGames