By Ryan Miemczyk, director of research at Trust Impact
In my day job, I am a Director of Research at Trust Impact, a social impact and data consultancy, working with charities to define their strategy and capture and display the difference they make. Outside of work I adore sport. It is the intersect between these two spheres that I think we can learn a few lessons.
I’ve spent 18 years playing international sport at the highest level and what I’ve learned is that everyone can benefit from a coach.
At a societal level we are getting better at understanding this, with the benefits from mentorship schemes increasingly being recognised. However, what we haven’t caught up on yet, is live coaching.
Why? Because, unlike charity impact reporting, athletes learn from both their successes and errors almost immediately.
My sport, touch rugby, was great for this. There are so few people on the pitch that you get lots of ‘hands-on’ game time, which means you get to repeat skills numerous times a game. The game setup also means that you come off and onto the pitch roughly every 90 seconds, meaning you can get anecdotal and statistical feedback in real-time. The immediacy of the feedback from coaches allows continual adjustment and refinement.
How does this apply to impact monitoring for charities?
Research tells us that to improve, we need input, perception, and knowledge of the result to allow us to adapt our skills. To get better, simply continue to repeat the loop.
Knowledge of results is where the coaching element comes in but what is missing from this simple model is the importance of timing. Meaning immediate feedback is most effective because that is when we are most prepared to learn*.
Charity leaders have an incredibly difficult job because the feedback loop is often left open for long periods of time (if ever closed), meaning they must guess whether the action they took has been successful. And even when they find out, it’s been so long that there’s a risk they are less prepared to learn from the experience.
Many charities do a good job of regularly evaluating interventions, collecting case studies, or reporting on impact, and whilst these activities provide feedback, they often have a delay in immediacy, meaning progress on improvement is slower. It can also end up in a tendency to focus on the positives and ignore the opportunities for learning.
What can we do about it?
The simplest solution is to report more frequently, but traditional evaluation remains costly and time-consuming—often feeling like looking in the rear-view mirror. While annual impact reports provide valuable insights, they rarely allow leaders to adapt their strategies in real time.
The key is to shift towards real-time monitoring. By tracking a charity’s outcome indicators as they happen, leaders gain immediate feedback, allowing them to course-correct proactively rather than reactively. Even better, this approach fosters collaboration with beneficiaries and funders, building greater trust and transparency.
Of course, anyone who has ever compiled an impact report knows how resource-intensive it can be. That’s why real-time monitoring must be simple, efficient, and sustainable. Fortunately, advances in technology have made this approach far more accessible and affordable than ever before.
For charities looking to embrace live data reporting and visualisation, the path forward involves:
- Defining the impact they want to achieve
- Collaborating with beneficiaries to identify key outcomes
- Selecting suitable, meaningful measures
- Keeping data collection simple and focused
- Building robust, timely data collection mechanisms
- Automating analysis to reduce manual effort
- Making data insights accessible and embedding them into decision-making at senior levels
How Trust Impact can help ACEVO members
At Trust Impact, we help charities move beyond traditional impact reporting to embrace live data monitoring. We work with organisations to:
- Define clear and meaningful outcomes
- Develop simple, real-time data collection methods
- Automate impact analysis and reporting
- Create accessible, live data dashboards for ongoing decision-making
By embedding these approaches, we empower charity leaders to make evidence-based decisions, adapt strategies in real time, and strengthen trust with funders and beneficiaries.
A live data visualisation won’t solve every challenge, but by incorporating real-time feedback, we can make smarter decisions, faster—and ultimately, improve our impact.
Perhaps live data is the coach we all need.
*Wright, T. P. (1936). Factors affecting the cost of airplanes. Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3(4), 122–128. https://doi.org/10.2514/8.155
Photo by Nguyen Thu Hoai on Unsplash