This summer, the Pointer team supported Share Bristol on a mission to explore their impact and strengthen the way they capture and communicate it. Share Bristol is a charity that acts as a ‘Library of Things’ to enable people across the city to borrow items rather than buy them, making their ability to effectively report their impact on Bristol’s community critical to their sustainability.
The Challenge
As a charity that delivers both environmental and social value, Share Bristol knew that they have significant impact in their communities. However, being able to evidence this impact was an
organisational challenge both in terms of data accuracy and managing resource capacity. Therefore, Pointer was asked to support them in selecting the most suitable data to track and clarify the steps required to put this into practice.
1. Exploring and Understanding
Throughout this project, it was key that the outputs were informed by the deep expertise of the Share Bristol’s Trustees. With this in mind, Pointer began engaging the team with a blue-sky exploration of what impact reporting could look like for the charity. The workshop also identified
their drive for an impressive impact report, map out their stakeholders and dive into existing data management processes to assess where existing practices could be repurposed. Additionally, we explored commonly used frameworks across similar organisations and wider impact reporting, to assess which elements of each resonated most with the Share Bristol team.
2. Framework Development
With purpose, stakeholders and activities mapped out, Pointer worked through the workshop activity outputs to highlight the priority areas, data inputs and processing stages. This included a wire diagram that highlighted common uses for data, ease of processing, and the variety of ways that data could be presented to engage different stakeholders. After incorporating feedback from Share Bristol to ensure the variety of impacts and operational routes felt coherent, the final output provided a blueprint timeline that could be used when they were ready to begin embedding the processes.
The Outcome
Through engaging with Pointer, the Share Bristol project team had dedicated time to walk through their needs in impact reporting, align priorities and explore operational capability. Going forward,
the team now have a clearer picture of the data that goes into impact reporting, how to pull the information into marketing, funding applications, and internal evaluation and learning.
“We found the team at Pointer to be an actual delight. They ‘got’ us straightaway, listened and unpicked the narrative... of our broad theory of change, and found the convergence of what we wanted to evidence and what we could do with our available tools.”
- Anna Ralph, Trustee at Share Bristol.
Partner with Pointer
At Pointer, our mission is to help purpose-led organisations understand and demonstrate their value, helping them to maximise their positive impact on the communities they serve. If your organisation is considering impact reporting or needs an external perspective on how to reach wider business strategy goals, we are here to help. Reach out to a member of our team, or email us at enquiries@pointerconsultancygroup.co.uk.
To find out more about what we do visit our our core service page here.