Improving Social Impact of Turkish Women’s NGOs: A shared measurement approach

Koç University Social Impact Forum (KUSIF) started its project, called “Improving Social Impact of Turkish Women’s NGOs: A Shared Measurement Approach.” Funded by the Matra Projects Program of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, KUSIF aims to develop a shared measurement method with this project to enable women’s NGOs in Turkey to measure their social impact and set a benchmark for other NGOs as well.

What is shared measurement?

Shared measurement of social impact is a method that informs how non-governmental organizations working for similar objectives could measure their social impacts about desired topics and the instruments necessary for that. Coordinating the efforts of non-governmental organizations, a shared measurement approach aims to increase the efficiency, knowledge, and effectiveness of the system of inter-related organizations that affect complex social issues.

Proceeding for 12 months, the general layout of the project is as following:

Training:

On October 26, as the first event of the project, KUSIF brought the representatives of 15 women’s NGOs in Turkey together to initiate a collaboration among them. KUSIF gave training the representatives regarding the terms used in the shared measurement approach to promote a common language for evaluating their social impact. On October 27, there was a focus group to investigate the compounded perspectives arising from the representatives’ conversancy

On February 2016, the event was repeated with the same 15 representatives.

Survey Study:

After the trainings and focus group discussions, many non-governmental organizations, women being their target audiences, were surveyed and the outputs of the survey were presented at a web portal on which the methods of social impact measurement were shared as well.

Conference:

On June 2016, a conference in which related institutions, persons and women’s NGOs participated and the outputs and experiences of the NGOs regarding the usage of the social impact measurement methods were shared and organized.

In sum, with this project, KUSIF aims to disseminate information about social impact measurement and to enable the related non-governmental organizations to measure their own social impacts. All the outputs of the project were shared on a public web portal. Through the portal, the shared measurement method generated served as a model for other organizations as well.