On Wednesday 9th September we hosted a special event in Northern Ireland to celebrate the successful completion of our pilot project with Inspiring Impact.

Inspiring Impact is a UK wide initiative that aims to change the way the voluntary and community sector thinks about impact, and to make high quality impact practice the norm for charities and social enterprises.

As a programme partner, we have been supporting 20 of our members in Northern Ireland through the pilot, with all the groups pledging their support for the Code of Impact Practice and 18 implementing their own Impact Practice Action Plans, having completed the ‘Measuring Up!’ self-assessment tool.

Through the use of Inspiring Impact’s tools and resources, we have been helping our members to better understand the cycle of impact practice and how they can reliably measure their own impact in order to articulate the difference they are making to their communities.

At the ‘Inspired by Your Impact’ celebrations, our pilot groups were joined by our Chief Executive, Chris Grant, along with a number of our volunteer mentors and CENI staff members. The event provided opportunity to reflect on the key learning and challenges for groups involved in the pilot through a combination of group discussions and individual case studies.

Those involved in the pilot commented on Wednesday evening:

“We knew what we were offering but didn’t appreciate the impact it had……we knew we had a difference but were not measuring this in any way. Involvement in Inspiring Impact has changed this.”

“Measuring Up! was simple and to the point, and taught us how to structure the process of impact measurement in order to imbed it into the organisation.”

“Measuring Up! allows for collective sharing of ideas and reflections at different points of the process”.

“It has been a helpful experience particularly for younger committee members and subcommittee groups. We have a few ideas on how we can adapt the tool to assist us with training volunteers.”

The groups’ commitment to Impact Practice was acknowledged at the close of the event with a ‘Certificate of Completion’, presented by Chris, who highlighted the importance of the pilot programme for Sported’s own learning and development.