Social Impact Measurement Case Study

Isadora Bonetto, PlayKids (product intern), volunteered in the 7th edition of Potencialize, Fundação 1Bi’s volunteer program, which provides free technology and management consulting to NGOs across the country. Below, they share what their one-month volunteer experience at Instituto Miguel Fernandes Torres was like.

When I learned about the program, I thought the idea was incredible and was very excited to get started! Potencialize divided the volunteers into groups and matched them with an NGO based on the challenges it had identified. Before making initial contact, we received background information about the NGO and the reasons it had applied to the program. Our overall understanding was further enhanced through the use of the “C Model,” a methodology suggested by Fundação 1Bi that helped us gain greater visibility into the NGO’s purpose, as well as its entire business flow and organizational capacity.

In our first conversations, we focused entirely on completing the C Model, listening to the NGO’s members, and asking questions. They were highly productive meetings filled with meaningful exchanges! During them, we were able to map the NGO’s biggest organizational challenges, which, in short, involved the difficulty of measuring the impact of its social projects.

Through the exchanges we had with the NGO, we developed an action plan to guide our work in the following weeks, with the support of the NGO’s members, who were always willing to answer our questions and reflect together with us. We decided to create a list of indicators that would be important to the NGO and, based on that, calculated some indicators using existing data and considered ways to collect other necessary information, taking into account all the processes already in place within the Organization.

We therefore made adjustments to documents already used by the NGO, such as the enrollment form and waiting list, and created two others: a reenrollment form and an exit form. With these documents, created using online tools, we were able to include targeted questions and collect relevant information for calculating indicators and, consequently, assessing the NGO’s performance. In addition, it was possible to streamline the Organization’s data collection process, which had relied on notebooks, making it difficult to maintain and subsequently use the data.

The Social Organization received the solution very positively and was very

grateful for its participation in the project. The documents developed were implemented by the NGO the day after we delivered them and are already making it easier to organize and measure the Organization’s impact!

Participating in Potencialize was a sensational and highly rewarding experience. We were able to feel the project’s impact on the NGO while developing and applying skills that are very important in our daily lives: communication, cooperation, critical analysis, and many others!