Impact tracker

This latest Impact Tracker has been designed to help your Healthwatch keep an ongoing record of outcomes and impact you are working towards and then summarise what you have achieved in a single document.

It also allows you to select outcomes you’d like to share with us, so we can promote them more widely and make a stronger case nationally for the power of the network.

Should you decide you don’t need to use the Tracker, there's a simple alternative spreadsheet you can still use to share the outcomes you achieve with us.

About this resource

Demonstrating impact is important to help secure future funding and ensure that we are seen as a credible organisation both locally and nationally.

This Tracker will help you to:

• plan follow-up work to check what success you've had.
• Reduce the possibility of things being overlooked.
• Review which areas of your work lead to the greatest success.
• More easily access details about your achievements for reporting and publicity purposes.

Starting with the Tracker

The Tracker contains an instruction sheet.

For you to be able to use the Tracker properly, you must:

• Download and save a copy on your own system.
• Open it in a full version of Microsoft Excel, not an online / Office 365 browser version.

Important: If a warning comes up about macros, or you are asked to choose whether to allow/enable them, then you need to confirm ‘enabling’ them. Otherwise, a couple of the features of the spreadsheet won’t work. The message you get and need to confirm might look like this:

If your IT system is run by another organisation, then you might find it’s set so you can’t ever enable macros. This might mean you need to ask them it’s possible to do so with this one spreadsheet. Or it might mean it’s not feasible for you to use it fully.

Using the Tracker

Use the Tracker as much or as little as you find useful for your team's needs. The three main sheets we suggest you might want to use are to keep a record of outcomes from individual enquiries, published reports, and other influencing work. But you could start by using just one or two of those and see how it goes.

Each of these main sheets has 300 rows that you can use before you would need to start using a completely new Tracker spreadsheet. 

Other sheets will be useful for some but not all Healthwatch.

The level of detail you record is entirely up to you. Decide how to incorporate completing it into your weekly or monthly ways of working.

You may want to consider introducing a new Impact Assistant volunteer role to try and recruit someone to specifically help support the team’s use of the Tracker.