Top Social Impact Metrics to Track in 2022

CSR Professionals all want to improve. They want to improve their strategy, increase their employee engagement, and drive more impact. However, without the proper information, it’s challenging to know where to focus your efforts to get the results you want. 

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Having reliable and easy-to-use data is crucial in understanding how your CSR program is performing and what you can do to improve it. There are a variety of reporting tools available for CSR professionals. Use the one that gives you what you need in the easiest fashion. Having a reporting system with the bells and whistles isn’t helpful if it takes months to update or you’re too frightened to open it. Like most things, go with the software or tool that you’re most comfortable with.

Here are the top CSR metrics to track to improve your program:

Volunteer Engagement & Trends:

• What are the trends you’re seeing across your employee base and volunteering? Is volunteering increasing or decreasing? What causes areas or UN Sustainable Development Goals are people most interested in supporting? What volunteer format gets the most engagement and impact?
• These data points around cause areas and formats allow you to understand what you can do to increase your engagement. For example, if employees care about sustainability, you should support more volunteering around that cause area. Similarly, you should focus on whatever volunteer format works best for your employees.
  

Impact Tracking:

• Can you actually track the specific impact your team is having through volunteering and giving? Using this data, CSR teams can increase their impact per volunteer hour and dollar donated. The first step in this process is ensuring you work with nonprofits who focus on tracking actual impact! 
• Tracking impact relative to budget can also be a great way to understand how to maximize your team’s success over the next year.
  

Alignment Between Corporate Grants and Employee Interests:

• Do your corporate grants and support match the interests of your employees? In an ideal world, the entire company unites around the same causes and UN Sustainable Development Goals. This alignment is important to ensuring employees feel engaged in their corporate mission. 
• Apart from impact, one of the largest benefits to CSR is employee engagement and retention. Are retention numbers getting better as the program improves? It's valuable to gather employee feedback on the CSR program during exit interviews. 
  

Employee & Leadership Feedback:

• Surveying employees to better understand their perception of the company’s CSR mission is crucial to improving it. While this may not be numbers-based data, it’s possible to sift through the anecdotal feedback to better understand how to improve. We’ve also seen NPS (Net Promoter Score) be an effective tool for measuring a program’s efficacy with employees. 
• With leaders, it's effective to host small round-table discussions or monthly lunches to get their perspective on the current program and their various goals.  
  

Whatever challenges you're facing, data helps find the right solution. The WeHero team is here to help collect and measure your data, and to pull relevant insights from your existing data.