Impact Assessment and Management in Social Projects

Impact is all about creating incremental value for your beneficiaries, that are long term, inter-generational and sustainable over the long run.

The world is now moving from Impact Assessment to Impact Management. This is so because we are planning deeply for social projects. Most of the successful social projects are defined by:

• Planned Inputs (Activities). All the activities done in social projects are done with a specific objective in mind. There are "reasons" for such activities to be done and what shall be achieved by those.
• Resource Allocation: All activities outline the resources they would be needing for these activities.
• Outputs: The short-term results from such activities.
• Outcomes: The change created by these activities.
• Impact: The broad long-term effect of the programme.

ANK takes pride if following a life-cycle approach to projects. It plans all its project meticulously to ensure that the agreed outputs and outcomes with the donor are achieved. ANK along with its donors deliberate at the beginning of the project itself, where we want to be at the end of the project.

At the beginning of each baseline studies are done of the mapped indicators so that the progress and change and the impact created by it can be measured at each and every step.

Especially in CSR Projects, Impact evaluation, measurement or management becomes crucial. As a prerequisite, organisations are supposed to do CSR is a project mode and not one-off activities. Now almost all projects that an organisation is doing, is because there is a problem statement or vision attached to it. There is some specific goal that the organisation is envisioning and supporting. All our CSR projects are done in project mode and they have measurable outcomes.

CSR in practice will need to be oriented towards major societal challenges in the business context which require strategic responses. In parallel, it will need to be firmly grounded in robust approaches to impact assessment and management. This implies a closer and deeper integration strategic planning into organisational mindsets and culture.

Every CSR project that ANK does, has an internal monitoring committee that focuses on the key indicators and this data is constantly shared with the donors too. Ank has ensured the best impact results through a capacity building approach where many staff of ANK have been trained in Social Impact Management and Measurement. External impact evaluations are also encouraged to the donor so that we get an outside in perspective into our programs and its successes and areas of improvements.

This experience in impact management has also ensured that the deep expertise that the ANK team and its group of experts have in impact evaluation and assessments can be shared with organisations looking for a credible organisation to do impact assessment, impact evaluation or life cycle impact management of CSR projects for them as an expert agency.