Having impact and rising to the challenge

At NPC, we’re all about impact. We know that charities and philanthropists do great work, and we want to help them to maximise their impact. That’s what drives everything that we do.  

So, it’s only natural that we look at our own impact as well. I’ve always found looking in the mirror to be helpful for us, and a key part of assessing our impact is talking to you—our audience. So, we do a survey, usually every other year, to get some handle on what people think. It’s not perfect – it goes out to our mailing list and via social media, and the response rate is not as high as we would like. But it tells us something. 

This year, a majority of you told us that our work is influencing what you do, helping you to increase the impact of your organisation and being a positive force in the sector. That’s very good to hear. But you also raised some challenges for us to address, including being more accessible for small charities.  

Helping you to increase your impact 

Helping you in your role is our main aim. Have we done that? 

This year, 55% of you said that we influenced your work to a great extent or to some extent.  

Individual respondents spoke about ‘regularly referring to the Theory of Change in 10 steps’ and using ‘NPC resources extensively to shape how we approach impact measurement of our strategic goals’.  

And for many that influence led to specific action. 44% of you said that you have or plan to take a specific action because of working with NPC.  

There were some great examples: 

• ‘We now have a working group looking at how we make a difference locally to our beneficiaries.’ 
• ‘Working with you has encouraged us to add policy work to our new strategy.’ 
• ‘Encouraged trustees to consider the importance of assessing the impact the charity has made.’ 

More broadly, 89% of you thought that we have a positive influence on the sector as a whole. As one respondent put it, ’The implications of not having organisations like NPC in the sector would be highly detrimental’. 

Challenges  

But of course, looking in the mirror, you don’t just get to see how good you look! We also heard about the some of the challenges that you’ve put to us. An important one was to make sure that our work is relevant and accessible to all of you who work in small charities.  

We hope that most of our work contains some lessons that can be applied by people working in small organisations. Respondents from small charities certainly appreciated having all of our resources available for free.  

This links to another important challenge raised by this year’s feedback—to make our work more accessible. People asked for shorter summaries and easier to read options. They also want to be able to find things on our website more easily. We work a lot with smaller charities and have a lot of material that can readily be used by them. But we need to see how to bring it all together and make it easier to find, to access and to use, which is something that our communications team will be working on in the coming year.  

Conclusion 

We’re delighted that our work is making a difference for you. 

We want to take these challenges on and improve where we can, to help all of you to make even more impact in what we know will be a challenging year.