STANDARD:
To meet the standard in full, you review evidence regularly as a team. You examine how and why changes have taken place. Where possible you involve a wider group of stakeholders to help sense-checking your findings.
Try to review your results regularly to ensure that you are making good progress and achieving the things you hoped for.
A simple way to do this is regularly assess progress against your performance indicators, and evaluate performance based on appropriate points of comparison.
You may want to develop a simple Performance Dashboard along the lines of the one below.
| Performance Indicator | Baseline | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Total Year to Date | Target: Current Year | Variation From Target |
| Outcome A | ||||||||
| A1 | ||||||||
| A2 | ||||||||
| A3 | ||||||||
| Outcome B | ||||||||
| B1 | ||||||||
| B2 | ||||||||
| B3 | ||||||||
| Outcome C | ||||||||
| C1 | ||||||||
| C2 | ||||||||
| C3 | ||||||||
You can track the data compared to your baseline measure as you collect it monthly, quarterly and cumulative throughout the year. Once you have data for more than a period of one year, you can examine trends.
You can also regularly review progress against targets, using variances to help spot if your work is meeting, exceeding, or falling short of targets.
Likewise you could add and report against any helpful benchmarks to aid interpretation.
The key point is that you should review progress regularly and as a routine part of what you do.
You may find it helpful as a group (board, staff, partners, etc.) to make sense of information gathered and the implications for the organization. You can use reflective questions as prompts to encourage feedback and discussion, for example:
Think about how you can build opportunities for reflection into organizational planning sessions, team meetings, board meetings, annual general meetings, and other events.
Section 10 explores in more how you can build an impact culture and learning systems into the work of your social enterprise.
