As money in the community sector dries up, ImpactLab’s boss sees the information the analytics firm provides “as a tool” to help charities prove their worth.
The company, co-founded and chaired by former prime minister Sir Bill English, has completed nearly 300 assessments measuring what it calls “social return on investment”.
Its chief executive Maria English told Q+A her organisation’s reports, which can cost charities up to $30,000, aim to demonstrate the long-term value of social services.
She said: “If you take government, for example, often the most information they get about what community organisations are doing is through their contract reporting, and there are a couple of real issues with that.
“The first one is it’s very siloed — so if it’s education contract, [it might be] school attendance, but a charity might need to be addressing housing, healthcare, food in order to achieve better school attendance, but none of that’s captured in the contract.
“It’s also very much driven by the funder, and charities spend a lot of time chopping and changing how they report to what it is that each funder cares about.
“In our reporting, what we’re trying to do is give charities a chance to show a more holistic story of how they’re making an impact across time, across different domains of people’s lives, and also the story that they see as the real story of change, rather than just what a contract says they should care about.”
It comes as Finance Minister Nicola Willis progresses the development of a “social investment approach” to delivering services, pushing ahead with an initiative first birthed by Sir Bill when he was in the same job nearly a decade ago.
This week, she gave a speech outlining her vision for a more data-driven and early intervention-focused approach to funding social services.
Willis said: “We want to be able to invest for the long-term, acting early, rather than waiting for the inevitable crisis, so that we can look ahead to getting dividends in terms of better lives for many years to come. Investing now so we can save later.”
Asked about ImpactLab’s influence on funding decisions, Maria English said the firm provides analysis but has “no influence over what decision-makers do with that tool”.
“I think we see the information as a tool,” she told Q+A.
“We have no influence over what decision-makers do with that tool, but I happen to really believe that at a pretty fundamental, that information is critical.”
The use of social impact reports has previously raised concerns over perceptions they are becoming an increasingly more important part of securing government funding.
In May, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey used a figure from ImpactLab analysis to help justify $24 million of spending on Gumboot Friday and the I Am Hope Foundation.
Asked about the method behind its reports, English said her firm brought an “independent methodology” and a “pretty demanding” process to get its figures.
“We get the data from the charity. We combine that with other data. And we put it through a pretty demanding and consistent social return on investment process to come up with the number,” she told Q+A.
“We work through a process to help charities understand some important concepts, like meaningful engagement — like, what does it mean for someone to meaningfully engage with your service? What do you understand about the kind of the story that has brought people to your service? Then we’ll look at that data, and because we’ve looked at 300 other programmes, we can calibrate a bit if things look a bit off or if things don’t add up.
“Then we do, kind of, a logic map of how do we think impact happens here?
“And what do the Government data and the academic evidence show us to help us build confidence that change is occurring?”
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air