If you run a nonprofit or social enterprise in Australia, you’ve probably been told you need to measure your impact. You’ve also probably noticed that nobody agrees on how to do it, and most of the frameworks out there seem designed for organisations with a full-time evaluation team and a budget the size of a small country.

I’ve been covering the impact measurement space for years, and I’m going to be straight with you: it doesn’t have to be this complicated. Here’s a practical approach that works for real organisations with real constraints.

Start with what you’re actually trying to change

This sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed how many organisations skip it. Before you build a measurement framework, you need to be crystal clear about your intended outcome. Not your activities. Not your outputs. Your outcome.

Activities are what you do. Outputs are what you produce. Outcomes are what changes for the people you’re trying to help.

If you run a job training program, your activities are workshops and mentoring sessions. Your outputs are the number of people who complete the program. Your outcomes are whether those people actually get and keep jobs, and whether their economic situation improves.

Most organisations measure activities and outputs because they’re easy. Outcomes are harder, but they’re the only thing that matters.

Pick three to five indicators and stick with them

The biggest mistake I see is organisations trying to measure everything. They create elaborate logic models with dozens of indicators, then never actually collect the data because it’s too overwhelming.

Pick three to five indicators that directly relate to your intended outcomes. For a youth employment program, that might be:

• Employment rate six months after program completion
• Average weekly earnings compared to baseline
• Self-reported confidence score (pre and post)
• Program completion rate
• Employer satisfaction score

That’s it. Five things. You can measure those. You can report on them. You can use them to improve your program.

Use what you’ve already got

Before you invest in fancy impact measurement software, look at what data you’re already collecting. Most organisations are sitting on surprisingly useful information that they never analyse.

Your CRM has client demographics and engagement data. Your financial system has cost-per-client figures. Your intake forms have baseline data. Your feedback surveys have satisfaction scores.

The trick isn’t collecting more data. It’s actually using the data you have.

Talk to the people you’re serving

This is the one that gets neglected most often, and it’s probably the most important. Quantitative data tells you what happened. Qualitative data tells you why it happened and what it meant to the people involved.

Build regular conversations with your clients, beneficiaries, or community members into your operations. Not just satisfaction surveys — actual conversations. Ask them what changed for them. Ask them what didn’t work. Ask them what they’d do differently.

These conversations will teach you more about your impact than any framework ever will.

Report honestly

Here’s where most organisations fall down. They measure their impact, find that some things are working and some things aren’t, and then only report on the things that are working.

Stop doing this. Honest reporting — including about what’s not working — builds credibility with funders, partners, and the broader sector. It also helps you improve.

The best impact reports I’ve read in Australia are the ones that say “here’s what we achieved, here’s where we fell short, and here’s what we’re changing as a result.” That’s the kind of transparency that builds trust.

A few tools worth considering

For Australian organisations on a budget, there are some practical options. The Social Impact Measurement toolkit from Social Ventures Australia is free and well-designed for the local context. The ASVB Impact Measurement approach provides a structured methodology. And for basic data collection, even a well-designed Google Form connected to a spreadsheet can get you surprisingly far.

You don’t need expensive software to measure your impact. You need clarity about what you’re measuring and the discipline to actually do it.

The bottom line

Impact measurement isn’t about proving you’re wonderful. It’s about understanding whether what you’re doing is actually working, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Keep it simple, be honest, and focus on outcomes. That’s really all there is to it.