Ten Impact Questions

Another way of thinking about social value management is through asking a set of questions to the right people at the right time. It is then about using the answers to help you in making the different choices, or decisions, that we are all constantly having to make in our work, at different levels of risk, times of the year, amounts of resource. Constantly exploring different options and changing what you do makes it more likely that you will be creating as much impact as you can and continually improving your impact, as well as the services that you offer.

In the Maximise your Impact guide we talk about ‘impact thinking’ which means focusing on creating as much net positive impact as we can with the resources we have. Impact thinking means making choices, for example between one strategy and another, between one product and another, or between trying to improve one product or another. Choices intended to create more impact than before.

To make these choices there are some questions you will need to answer. The Impact Questions are fundamental to maximising impact, impact questions should be asked throughout your planning and delivery cycle for your activities, as outlined below.