Is you're monitoring and evaluation system working for you? Are you able to provide
impact reports and grant reports to funders on time? Do you have data sitting across multiple
systems that increases the total time it takes for you to build impact reports?
Hi everyone. My name is Chris Gaines, lead trainer at SoPact and if you are nonprofit or social
enterprise struggling to raise much-needed capital or impact funds, you are in the
right place. Today, we're diving into the biggest challenges of collecting data and creating impact
reports. Our goal is to turn this challenge into the biggest opportunity that organisations ignore,
raising grants or impact capital. Well many social enterprises and nonprofits collect data,
most of it isn't utilised or even really actionable. A well-designed data strategy
can increase your accountability making it much easier for continuous learning,
improvement and direct reporting of impact to a specific funder. Keep in mind, most monitoring
and evaluation systems fail to provide a scaleable solution to aggregating results
on a daily basis and if they do it might require a significant customisation. In our last video,
we gave insights into actually collecting data for your ventures. You can find that
video in the description link below. This video will explain the key challenges of the
existing systems as well as look into potential solutions that we'll explore in depth in later
videos. So don't forget to smash that like button and subscribe so you don't miss any
of the new videos that we're releasing very soon. Without further adieu, let's jump into
seven of the biggest challenges you'll face when developing your reports for potential funders.
Challenge number one: Your data collection does not keep up with
the funders required reporting methods. Mission driven organisations often grow
their data collection strategies organically as their programs and
their funders online. In most organisations, data collection evolves in an ad-hoc fashion,
making it difficult to streamline funder specific reporting. Hence most of them
export data on a spreadsheet clean it up and then prepare it for reporting. However
there can be many specific challenges with this approach. It's a lack of consistency in
reporting. Data collection is not consistent nor aligned to funders. Data aggregation for
reporting is time-consuming. Relying on external data analytics tools like Tableau or Power BI
can significantly increase your time and require special skills to utilize. Often theory of change,
data collection and reporting or align which makes continuous improvement in learning a pipe dream.
Number two: Activity and output driven reporting is not impactful.
The key factor is that in order to successfully acquire impact capital, you need to accurately
demonstrate evidence of your impact. An effective report will require you to demonstrate evidence of
impact or social outcome. Often today's monitoring and evaluation tools focus
on activity and output based reporting. Many organizations start with long household surveys,
which often failed to collect on the key outcome that aligns with their theory of
change. We need a system that focuses on the core aspects of impact management and outcomes
that aligned towards program goals. This can be achieved through a better theory of change,
outcome and stakeholder survey with well-designed qualitative and quantitative stakeholder feedback.
Number three: Data collection and aggregation is time-consuming.
As an organization adds new programs, the reporting system becomes challenging and
isolated. For example, for homelessness, a government funder may insist on using the
HMIS system. Social services systems may insist on using case management systems and others may
choose to customize salesforce based program management or effort to outcome systems. While
these systems might manage program data, often the reporting tends to be fairly limited and does not
align well with funders reporting requirements. Hence an organization will often hire a monitoring
an evaluation specialist who will export the data from multiple systems, manually cleanse
it and often complex tedious and error-prone spreadsheet and prevent anyone from deriving good
insights into continuous learning and improvements through that data. The powerful solution to this
situation involves collecting data in a single repository transitioning paper or spreadsheet
to a mobile based data collection, incorporating real-time data as well as intelligent field map.
Number four: What's worse than time and sensitive data collection? Low quality data.
Today a large number of organizations still rely on spreadsheets to collect all of the
data. Even today, a lot of organizations rely on spreadsheets to present their results. In fact,
many organizations transfer their information from paper to spreadsheets. This process
not only results in wasted time, it also reduces the amount of actionable
information that you can have at any one point. This becomes a challenge
when you have variations in reporting quality and transcription quality.
Number five: Online or mobile data collection often lacks
a 360 degree view of the program's results. While there are hundreds of online and offline
data collection tools available, their built-in analytics often only give information at the
question, which lacks the important analysis to compare multiple variations in the village,
race location over a period of time. In this situation, we're left with limited
intelligence and once again a lack of continuous learning and improvement for our programs.
Number six: Excel and Google Spreadsheets as different programs may use more than one system.
Most organizations try to bring all their data into Excel or Google Spreadsheets and carefully
reformat data regularly so that they can calculate results required by funders. As you can imagine,
this can create quite a few different problems when you're working in different
situations. The data gets unmanageable your data integrity is constantly at risk,
required to recreate or recheck formulas every time new data is
introduced. This also puts you at an extreme risk of staff turnover.
Number 7: Salesforce Many systems such as Salesforce
or case management collect a lot of data, but building the specific reports that you need
might be quite challenging. It can be difficult to combine data from multiple tables. Report
building within their given interface can be quite complex. You'll especially run into problems if
reporting for agreed-upon metrics comes from multiple external sources. You'll also run
into potential problems if you need to vary the frequency of reporting between monthly quarterly
or annually. While systems such as Salesforce can be quite robust, it can often can be difficult to
summarize your results. Often funders also require qualitative information that will
not be easily processed by a Salesforce. This will significantly increase the reporting time as well.
Here at SoPact, we understand that the organization's just like yours face challenges
like this on a daily basis. So we've developed a platform that streamlines the process of impact
management. Impact cloud simplifies the different forms of data collection and aggregation. There
is smart field mapping, real-time and mobile integration and database level
formulas. This simplifies your data collection, tracking and reporting through a simple system,
so that you can move from here to here. Well, thanks for watching everyone. I hope
you learned something new and I'm curious what challenges is your organization currently facing
when it comes to data collection and evaluation. So please drop a comment down below and let's
start a discussion so that everyone can share and grow in this space and as always for more
information go to SoPact.com to download your free ebook on monitoring and evaluation so you
can dive further into the subject and learn more about how you can apply these principles to what
your organization is looking to accomplish. Lastly don't forget to Like and subscribe,
so you never miss an upload and until then this has been Chris Gaines. I'll see you the next one.