5 KPIs every social impact professional should be tracking

Top performance metrics to ensure your social impact goals are within reach.

Meticulously tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) enables teams to achieve their monthly, quarterly, and annual goals, prioritize tasks, and make strategic workflow adjustments to adapt to the evolving needs of their customers and company. Additionally, KPIs are integral in helping CSR leaders communicate the story of their impact achievements to executives within their organization and external stakeholders, justifying the ROI of impact investment.

KPIs are carefully chosen metrics designed to gauge how individuals, teams, and projects progress toward a business objective. KPIs are quantifiable by definition, and they can be used to track both short-term and long-term goals.

Every business department requires KPIs, including CSR teams. However, measuring the effectiveness of a corporate social impact strategy is notoriously difficult.

There are several important KPIs that can help social impact leaders understand programming success. Here, we outline five social impact metric examples.

1. Employee participation/volunteer hours

This metric tracks total employee volunteer hours over a period of time. Employee participation hours can tell the story of your organization’s social impact inputs — resources

needed to deliver a program.

By partnering with a social impact provider like Visit.org, you can automatically capture volunteer hours through a sophisticated tech platform. This avoids employee self-reporting and streamlines your reporting process, ensuring that you capture and report on 100% of your volunteer hours.

2. Frequency of social impact experiences

Hosting one social impact experience is a good starting point for a small company. But the larger and more complex your organization, the more employee engagement resources are needed to connect teams from dispersed offices and remote locations.

That’s why many innovative CSR leaders are committing to host multiple social impact experiences throughout the year in a variety of participation formats, such as in-person, virtual, hybrid, and on-demand.

Organizing experiences around important observances and holidays is an effective way to frequently motivate employees. Plus, regularly scheduling experiences communicates to your employees and local communities that social impact is a deeply rooted part of your company’s culture — not just a one-off initiative.

Never miss an important observance: Visit.org’s team of experts can help you create an annual social impact itinerary.

3. Dollars donated to nonprofits

A relatively easy-to-measure metric that quantifies the number of total dollars your company donates to a 501(c)(3) or social venture over a period of time. Carefully tracking monetary donations enables your company to budget for social impact work in the future. Try amplifying your impact by providing a platform for your employees to donate to their nonprofit of choice following a social impact experience: Deloitte research shows that the majority of professionals donate to support a mission they are personally connected with, and over half of professionals give to missions that are important to advancing their community.

4. Employee participation

The employee participation KPI helps CSR leaders understand effective (or ineffective) practices — and provides hints on how to improve the success of social impact strategies. For example, if you find that an experience has a lower-than-average employee participation rate, try implementing best practices that are proven to increase employee participation. These best practices include:

• Recruiting an executive in your company to be a social impact experience ambassador.

• Highlight the impact of the experience in your internal marketing communications, so that employees get excited about contributing to a worthy mission.

• Send follow-up reminders one week, one day, and one hour prior to the event to generate buzz about the event, encouraging people to show up.

• Gamify participation by stoking friendly competition between departments. Real-time registration data can help you keep track of teams that have the most people signed up.

• From a practical standpoint, make sure you schedule events at a time when your employees can attend. If you have members of your company in multiple time zones, consider hosting two experiences so everyone can participate live.

Employee participation is a particularly vital KPI because it also affects other important metrics, such as employee volunteer hours. Accurate employee participation reporting helps identify if you need to re-strategize to reach your social impact objectives.

5. Social impact employee survey

It’s not enough to get your employees to show up to a social impact experience. If they don’t enjoy it, it will be difficult to encourage them to register for a future event.

Customizable, post-event surveys gauge how employees experienced a social impact event, and provide data that helps you plan programming that resonates with company values.

In addition to asking your employees to rate how they enjoyed the event (for an example, on a 1-5 scale), try gaining qualitative data with questions such as:

• Do you feel more connected to your company?

• Do you feel that you made an impact in your community today?

• Did you make a meaningful connection with a member of your team today?

• Do you want to participate in similar experiences again?

Pro tip: You can also send a pre-event survey to employees to ask them which impact areas they’re most interested in. This helps cater your programming to the values that matter most to your team.

Social impact key performance indicators are one piece of the puzzle

The key performance indicators outlined above are a great starting point for social impact leaders to understand the effectiveness of their programming. KPIs can keep your team on track to reach your social impact and employee engagement goals, and indicate if you need to adjust your strategy, experience themes, or internal communications.

However, measuring CSR also necessitates qualitative data to tell the whole story of your impact. When reporting on social impact, be sure to also gather information about the nonprofit organizations and individuals impacted by this work. Explore how social impact experiences helped your employees feel more connected to their company, colleagues, and community, too.

Explore how Visit.org can help your team achieve their social impact goals. Reach out to schedule a demo.