The impact journey starts with defining your desired impact – clearly capturing the ultimate goal in an impact statement. The impact statement is different from a mission statement – it is goal-oriented, involves the entire organization, and should be concise and measurable.

Once you have your impact statement, you have to find out whether your activities actually contribute to it. Therefore, you need to start measuring your impact by developing impact indicators at an organizational level.

Once your impact measurement provides you with impact results, you can start showing impact to the outside world and tell donors and other stakeholders about the genuine change that you have been able to achieve.

Most organizations indicate that the best way to increase impact is to raise more funds. Indeed increased funding can boost your impact, but impact can also be increased when funding levels remain stable. This can be done by focusing on interventions that achieve the most impact per euro spent (so-called cost-effective interventions).

It is no surprise that we call this an impact journey. It is a tour full of challenges and setbacks to convince everyone in the organization to buy into becoming impact-driven. It is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive process but this journey will boost the performance of the organization and attract new donors on the side.