Rethinking how we assess impact

The revised Charity Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) 2026 has put impact reporting firmly on every charity’s to-do list. 

All charities now need to summarise their achievements and show the difference they make to their beneficiaries and society, and for medium to larger charities, that means getting into the long-term effects too.

That’s a good thing. But here’s the risk: tick-box compliance with the SORP’s fairly modest requirements could give some charities a false sense of security, nudging them away from the kind of rich, real-world appraisal of impact that actually makes a difference. Meeting the SORP is the floor, not the ceiling.

So what does a genuinely useful impact assessment look like? In my experience as a Cranfield Trust volunteer, it starts not with a spreadsheet but with a conversation.

Step 1: Get the right people in the room

Rather than beginning with a list of what the chief executive and trustees think is important, my preferred approach is to bring representatives of four key stakeholder groups together, in person or on a call, and simply ask them what matters. Those four groups are:

• Funders - the oxygen without which charities simply couldn’t breathe. As funders become more sophisticated, they want objective evidence of real-world difference, not just heartstring-tugging stories. 

• Workers - everyone who takes action to pursue the charity’s aims: volunteers, staff, freelancers, partners and leaders. What unites them isn’t how they’re paid, but the fact that they inject their personal energy into the cause. Nobody knows better what it actually takes to make impact happen on the ground.

• Clients - the people and organisations who channel the charity’s work to end beneficiaries: schools, local authorities, doctors and more. They tend to have a sharp professional view of the need being met, and, crucially, how the charity stacks up against other options.

• Beneficiaries - the people whose lives are to be changed. Their perspective varies enormously. Some are deeply aware and grateful for the support they’ve received; others may not realise the significance of what the charity is doing, even when society as a whole does.

Step 2: Let the conversation shape your framework

Whenever I've run participative sessions with charities, a common pattern emerges: a pyramid-shaped value framework, not unlike a Theory of Change, that traces the line from specific activities and inputs all the way through to the long-term outcomes that address a real societal problem.

The labels on each layer of the pyramid will vary from charity to charity, but they work as “umbrella factors”: stable, overarching themes that hold firm over time, with more detailed measures underneath that can shift as priorities evolve. It’s a framework that gives you continuity without rigidity.

One charity I worked with relabelled their “Organisation Strength” layer as “Resilience”, because both funders and clients kept coming back to adaptability as the thing that set the charity apart. Under that heading, they tracked: average months of pledged funding, volunteer hour growth, staff and volunteer engagement, and a knowledge article count. Simple, purposeful, and directly connected to what stakeholders said they valued.

The side benefits of this process can be remarkable too. After one session, a funder rang up a few days later to say she’d heard enough to recommend bypassing the usual three-year funding review entirely. She’d seen what the charity was doing and she believed in it.

Step 3: Measure quality, not just quantity

Here’s a trap many charities fall into: listing volume and calling it impact. “We served fifty thousand meals.” Great- but what difference did it make? A stronger framework captures quality and purpose-matching alongside the numbers. Some approaches that work well:

• Client testimonials and case studies - still powerful for emotional resonance, and essential for telling human stories. But for more sophisticated funders and commissioners, they need to be backed up by data.

• Brand recognition sampling - surveys that check whether the charity’s bigger goals are actually being felt. If your mission is “empowerment”, are the people you support genuinely feeling empowered? It’s worth asking.

• Beneficiary engagement studies - more sophisticated techniques that link easier-to-measure immediate outcomes with the harder-to-prove long-term impact. For instance: if “being listened to” turns out to be the feedback that best predicts future recovery, you’ve just found something worth prioritising.

Step 4: Live it, don’t just report it

Building the framework is only the beginning. What really determines whether impact management succeeds is how consistently it shows up in leadership and communication. Every annual report, funding bid, social media post and trustee update is an opportunity - and a test. Does this piece of communication say something about everything our framework says matters?

If the answer is no, funders, workers, clients and beneficiaries will start to wonder whether you really mean it. And in the charity sector, trust is everything.