“How will we know your work has made a difference?”
It’s a great question I get asked by clients periodically.
And here’s a secret: if they don’t ask the question first, I ask it for them.
Because it’s important to me to be able to show the impact of the work I do.
So, when a client asks “How will we know your work has made a difference?” I respond with two questions of them:
1) What’s the impact you want to make?
2) How do you want to measure it?
Once I know the outcomes we’re aiming to achieve, I design experiences that take participants on a journey to those outcomes.
And together we design an assessment survey to measure the impact of my intervention.
Here’s an example:
A national marketing agency originally came to me looking for a change from traditional presentation skills training.
They’d heard about the benefits of improv, and initially hired me to run a pilot program for client-facing staff, to help them build rapport better with clients and present more creatively.
All with the ultimate goal of helping them win business faster.
The pilot was a hit, and the Head of People saw the benefit of the program not just for sales teams, but for leaders and HiPo’s across the organization.
As I redesigned the program, with feedback from the pilot, to be an Improv Leadership Training, I asked how the client wanted to measure impact, and we created a simple survey that we invited participants to answer before and after the program.
Here are a couple of examples of questions from the survey, visualized as pie charts, so you can literally see the impact:
My favorite question, though, was this one 😁:
Impact assessments are just one way that I show (in this case visually!) the impact my work is making for an organization.
Results like these are why I say play is not the opposite of work; play is how we make work more effective.
Unlike some play practitioners who seek merely to entertain, my goal is always to use play as a tool to help drive the larger initiatives of an organization forward.
So, what’s the impact you want to make? When you’re ready to discuss options, let’s set up a 10-minute Clarity Call.