I recently met with a new director of one of my clients, a charity.

When discussing what the charity could really use my help with, impact assessments naturally came up.

In and of themselves, impact assessments sound like a great idea – you want to know that the money you’re giving to a charity has positive impact on the people it serves.

But, mostly, charities impact squishy human beings with squishy human emotions.

And that can lead to some issues measuring impact.

One charity I worked with, a mental health charity, used a certain questionnaire before and after each patient’s set of sessions, to put numbers to their improvement. I duly analysed these numbers and presented my findings.

However, I wasn’t told beforehand that there are many qualms with that particular questionnaire.

See, that issue should have been addressed first, and a suitable questionnaire should have been used instead.

As it stood, the members of that organisation didn’t really want to promote that impact assessment (even though the outcome was largely good) because they didn’t trust the methodology.

To be fair, I could see how easy it would be as a patient to know how to answer that questionnaire the “right” or “wrong” way. With the dearth of mental health services in the UK, there is a real danger of patients simply wanting to please in order to get the help they need.

🦝

Asking the right questions extends to every area of our businesses, even when we aren’t running a charity.

🤔 You want to launch a new service or product – so you ask your followers whether they’d be interested. Many say yes, but few later buy.

❌ You didn’t ask if they’d be willing to pay £x for it. It’s easy to say, yeah, that’s a good idea, without thinking through the money side.

✅ Better to launch a minimum viable offer and gauge whether and how much customers are willing to pay before putting in lots of effort perfecting it.

🤔 You want to see if the new hire is effective – so you ask their colleague what they think.

❌ You forgot that the colleague doesn’t actually know how to do the new hire’s job, so is mostly judging their interpersonal communication skills, not their hard skills. They could still simply be nervous just a few days in, and that’s making them interact a bit more sharply or softly than the colleague would prefer.

✅ Better to craft a “What does success look like?” document while recruiting – and share it with your new hire – so that you have something more tangible to guide you both.

🤔 You want to keep an eye on your conversion rate and celebrate when it goes up.

❌ You didn’t notice that your leads are down and your sales are down less, so while your conversion rate is up, your number of deals closed is down. Your revenue is quite likely down, too.

✅ Better to keep an eye on several metrics together to get a better picture of the health of your business.

Are you asking the right questions?

If you’re not sure, I’d love to have a chat to see how I can help. Book a chat or DM me.

Links & Inspiration

I love this story about asking the right questions to get the answer you need. It follows on from my note above.

❌ I don’t love what the winning bet was, as I’ve mentioned previously on LinkedIn.

Setting that aside, this story about what survey question the French Whale asked to best judge the outcome of the recent US Presidential election is a brilliant example of why you need to put time into a data strategy before you get to work.

Offloading the tasks that aren’t in your zone of genius frees you up to do more of what you’re good at.

A recent study of 4,000 small and medium businesses, commissioned by QuickBooks, has quantified just how much benefit you can get by having a professional bookkeeper or accountant (PDF):

💰 Revenue is 11.5% higher, from £6k for sole traders to £553k for businesses with 100-250 employees

⏳ Average time saved is 9 hours per week

💸 Over the course of an SMB’s lifespan, it incurs nearly £9k in tax penalties, plus accounting mistakes that cost more than £8.3k on average, a risk mitigated by hiring professional help.

I’ve found a couple of bookkeepers after my own heart to recommend since leaving that field, who are also interested in empowering you with your numbers regularly. If you’re looking for one, Bunmi and Alice are both great choices.

I detest the pressure to dumb things down. 👎

I love what Seth Godin has said about what you should do instead.

There are no affiliate links in this or any of my emails or blog posts. I simply enjoy sharing resources that could help move your business forward.

Using your numbers to help make your business better

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