Social Impact Assessment Framework, Built to Take "Maximum 10 Hours a Year"

Social entrepreneurs and innovation organisations across the Baltic Sea Region now have access to a purpose-built toolkit for proving their social impact, following a video introduction by Paula Cukura, project lead at Riga Technical University (RTU), walking viewers through the Social Impact Assessment Framework developed under the RESIST project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b96DTYCoSfg

Two levels, one shared goal: keep it usable

A guiding design principle throughout development was practicality: the framework needed to be simple enough that an organisation could apply it in a maximum of ten hours per year. Piloting revealed that a single tool couldn’t serve everyone, so the team ultimately built two complementary levels.

Level One: the hands-on, entry-level guide

Aimed primarily at small social entrepreneurs, social innovators and NGOs, this entry point is less about organisation size than about maturity and capacity for impact work. It deliberately keeps quantitative data secondary, focusing instead on identifying qualitative social change stories, lived experience and open-ended feedback from the people an initiative serves.

The materials consist of two one-page worksheets plus a short slide deck walking users through them. One worksheet helps organisations describe the challenge they’re addressing, explore the lived experience of their target group, and identify the systemic barriers involved. The second worksheet helps identify social change on a case-by-case, project-by-project basis rather than at the whole-organisation level.

Cukura illustrated the distinction with a community kitchen example: the meaningful social change isn’t simply “50 people served a warm meal per week,” but the reduced loneliness, sense of belonging and meaningful interaction that can, over time, help rebuild confidence and support people’s path back into work or wider social life. Identifying that kind of change relies on conversation and stories with target groups, alongside supporting quantitative counts.

Level Two: the strategy development framework

The second level is a more structured system for building a full impact strategy and an accompanying monitoring and evaluation process, built on the Theory of Change methodology. Its materials include an Excel worksheet covering five practical, step-by-step tasks, a workbook (slide deck) walking through each step with examples and guiding questions, and a companion literature study that formed the evidence base for the whole approach. A collaborative Miro board version of the worksheets is also available for teams working together digitally.

The five-step process runs as follows:

1. Ecosystem canvas. A deep dive into each product or service an organisation offers and every stakeholder or target audience connected to it usable at organisational, programme or new-project level. An optional add-on here is a 30–40 minute “impact data audit,” guided by an AI-assistant prompt, to map what data an organisation already collects, spot blind spots, and get suggestions for improvement.
2. Theory of Change. Described as the core of the whole framework, this step asks organisations to start with their long-term vision and mission and work backwards toward long-term, medium-term and short-term outcomes, then the outputs, activities and resources needed, and finally the assumptions that must hold true for the strategy to work. Cukura invoked Simon Sinek’s “start with why” noting that most organisations know what they do and how, but far fewer are clear on why as the guiding logic for this step.
3. Monitoring and evaluation. Organisations list every indicator that might show progress, then narrow to those genuinely aligned with their outcomes, realistically measurable with their team’s resources, and useful for actual decision-making rather than reporting for its own sake. The framework also asks teams to define data sources, measurement frequency, timing and responsibility with a strong emphasis on embedding tracking into workflows organisations already run (team meetings, check-ins, existing reports, events and training sessions) rather than adding new burdens.
4. Stakeholder check-in and refinement. A pause to validate whether the theory of change and chosen indicators genuinely make sense, with room to adjust.
5. Reporting plan. A simple plan covering what gets tracked, who’s responsible, where the data comes from, and roughly how long reporting will take plus a recommendation to schedule follow-up meetings in advance to keep the strategy alive rather than let it lapse.

Supporting resources

Beyond the core five steps, the framework includes an “indicator quality checklist” described by Cukura as one of her favourite tools, using simple questions to test whether a candidate indicator is genuinely a good fit for a team’s needs — along with worked examples tailored to different types of stakeholders (clusters, support organisations, enterprises and individual innovators) and a list of data-collection methods spanning qualitative, quantitative and more creative approaches.

Where to find it

All materials are consolidated on the RESIST project website.

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