The goal of this website

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The Social Impact Navigator aims to help you plan and launch your project. We hope this website helps you achieve as much impact as possible through your project. Step by step.

On this website, we explain what social impact is, what levels of results you can generate and how you monitor the progress and impact of your project.

There is good news: social impact can be planned. In fact, there are different levels of results that help you indicate the extent of a project's social impact.

But doing so is not always an easy task; social impact seldom (!) happens by accident. Rather, it is a result of systematic planning, of pursuing specific impact-oriented objectives and of regularly checking whether these goals are still achievable.

This is the reason why we would like to encourage you, to make social impact your passion.

Yet, dealing with social impact offers so many advantages:

  • Who may benefit from using this website:

    This website is made for all people who engage in projects, initiatives or organizations – as volunteers or as full-time staff. We want to reach those who work at an operational level, that is, project managers and project employees of social projects.

  • If you focus on social impact from the outset of your project work, you are likely to work more effectively, more cohesively and, sometimes, even more quickly.

  • In the long run, social impact orientation saves money, time and nerves.

We would like to help you to make these advantages happen!

Of course, it is up to you how you use this website: You can work through the pages from the top to the bottom or you can do some cherry-picking and read specific contents only.

Since text alone does little to inspire, we offer videos, tests, checklists and work aids to make your way to social impact more engaging.

A little fun fact: to go through the entire website takes only 334 minutes (about 5.5 hours). At the top of each individual page, we provide an estimate of the average time it takes to read the content.

 

To make the abstract term of "social impact" more figurative, we will once in a while apply an analogy: a sea voyage. So, imagine your way to social impact in your project as a sea voyage.

In addition, we use a fictitious case study, called "Youth Employment Angels" (YEA), to illustrate what practical impact-oriented project work might look like.

  • Case Study: What does YEA do?

    YEA was founded 5 years ago; the project cooperates with two schools in an urban district. Since YEA is short of funds, the organization only employs one full-time project manager. The main operational work is done by volunteers who work with YEA as mentors.

    The project targets youths with poor school performance for whom finishing school with certification is a challenge. At the same time, we know that students who leave school without a degree or certification and who have no prevocational training are at a disadvantage when it comes to securing a vocational training position.

    YEA’s target have diverse backgrounds. Whereas all of them come from families with a low educational background, some may come from migrant families, others from socioeconomically disadvantaged families, and others from socioeconomically disadvantaged immigrant families.

    Taking these contextual factors into consideration, YEA aims to:

    • help these youths acquire the skills needed to secure training positions and to
    • support them along the path into professional life.

    YEA therefore provides young people with the supported of volunteers (for example retired executives) who engage as mentors. These mentors meet regularly to learn from one another. For this to happen with focus, some mentors take on additional responsibility as mentor group leaders.

    YEA also offers participating youth private tutoring and application training carried out by external professionals.

So let's start: What’s behind the concept of social impact? And how do you start planning a project with an explicit focus on social impact orientation?

  • While you are here...
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