Case Study 4 - Measuring up for growth

Are you interested in how other organisations measure their outcomes and impact?

Introducing Global Sisters.

Mandy Richards: “So Global Sisters is a movement that is democratising entrepreneurship. Our goal in the next five years is to support 42,000 women on their journeys to financial independence.”

Global Sisters providers participants, called Sisters, a number of free programs designed to educate, incubate and accelerate women’s microbusiness. 

Global Sisters launched in 2016 and since 2019 have been increasing their impact through scaling their program. 

Mandy Richards: “So our primary strategy for scaling Global Sisters was about taking all of our programs online, not to the exclusion of running programs face to face but we wanted to make sure everything was fully accessible to every woman across the country if she wanted to tap into Global Sisters.”

In order to track their outcomes and impact, Global Sisters have developed a Social Impact Platform that measures progress across six domains: business acumen, enterprise, financial wellbeing, empowerment, influence and connection.

Evaluating progress against these impact domains gave Global Sisters confidence to invest in scaling through digital program delivery. It also ensured that any growth was reflecting Sisters’ feedback on their experience of the program and that this evidence was used to shape the development of new initiatives to maximise Global Sisters’ impact. The use of rapid evaluations has also provided timely feedback to support significant growth within a short timeframe.

Global Sisters is now in their seventh year of operation. Reflecting on their learnings regarding measuring their outcomes and impact, they have five pieces of advice for other impact organisations.

Firstly, be clear on the impact that you want to make and focus on those domains. Global Sisters invested early on in identifying and testing their impact domains. This ensured that they had the appropriate ways to measure their intended outcomes before seeking to scale their program. 

Secondly, involve your customers from the beginning. By seeking regular feedback from Sisters, Global Sisters have been able to quickly identify learnings and implement continuous improvement initiatives to support their programs.

Thirdly, balance your ability to make impact and your ambitions for scale. Global Sisters took a cautious approach to scale, making sure that expanding their programs did not reduce their quality or the impact they could have on Sisters’ lives. 

Fourthly, making sure you learn what you want to measure before you invest in costly technology-based outcome and impact measurement tools. Keeping these tools simple provides space to learn what support you need and ensure you invest in systems that are well suited to your program and goals. 

Finally, Global Sisters have challenged the status quo regarding approaches to outcome and impact measurement. They focus on ensuring diverse female perspectives are reflected through accessible, visual and interactive reporting. This supports accountability and transparency.

Mandy Richards: “I think my advice around impact reporting without getting technical is to keep it super simple and also very visual, so I’m all about bullet points and diagrams and I think pictures are always much more digestible and tell a better story.”

Keeping your outcome and impact measurement systems simple provides space to learn what support you need and to invest in systems that are well suited to your program and goals. 

To find out more about Global Sisters outcome and impact measurement, visit dss.gov.au and search ‘Global Sisters’ for the full case study.