Blogs

Hibiscus Impact Journey

We have been supporting Hibiscus, who are a civil society organisation working to transform the lives and experiences of migrant women subject to marginalisation in the UK. We wanted to tell you about their journey over the last three years as they have moved to being more impact-led through their approach to data and evidence.

In the initial stages of our journey together, Hibiscus highlighted the main areas that the team wanted to work on, which included:

· Having a shared understanding across the organisation about the problems they are trying to solve and for which groups.

· Clarifying their purpose and understanding how best to realise their overall objectives with activities that align to the difference they seek to make.

· Strengthening the approach to evidencing the impact of their work on the lives of women as well as how to evidence systemic change from their policy and advocacy work.

We collaborated through a series of strategic workshops and support, providing advice and expertise around evidence and measurement. Throughout this process, Hibiscus and Trust Impact have:

· Developed a Theory of Change, and refined the organisation’s need, vision and purpose.

· Refocussed the organisation on their primary audience: migrant women subject to marginalisation in the UK.

· Developed a framework, set of measures, tools, and processes for evidencing the impact of support with women, as well as the policy and advocacy work.

· Conducted an 8-month impact data pilot to provide baseline impact data, visualised through PowerBI to allow real-time data tracking.

This collaboration has been a huge success. A culture of impact has been developed across the organisation, moving from collecting outputs to focusing on medium- and long-term outcomes. There is now a greater emphasis on the difference Hibiscus makes using new and innovative impact data strategies.

The Trust Impact team, Lisa Young and Scott Mitchell, worked closely with Liezel Kühn Keyser, Mufeedah Bustin and the wider team from Hibiscus.

The main benefits/value from working together on this project from Hibiscus perspective has been:

“Working with Trust Impact over the last few years has helped us continually improve our work, through supporting us to define our Theory of Change and providing expertise on our data collection pilot. We work with women in different environments and in different circumstances, so finding a set of measures that could be used consistently across the teams has required (and will continue to require) a continual improvement process.

Trust Impact has helped to challenge our perceptions of outcomes and impacts, supported with efficient data collection, and provided insights in to how to tailor our systems to visually represent our outcome data. They have shown us new ways of measuring the impact of our policy and influencing team’s work, which will add to our understanding of our work”.

The successful data pilot is just the start of the impact journey in measuring what really matters at Hibiscus. Collecting and visualising data to tell the overall impact story of the work of Hibiscus will continue and be strengthened over time, as we continue to work together to refine what we have started.

Thank you to all the team at Hibiscus for choosing Trust Impact to support you on this journey! We have loved working with you.