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Blog article 2 min read

Everyone is starting to adopt the UN SDG framework, but how can you effectively track your efforts against it?

SDGS-1

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become a widely adopted blueprint for organisations to map and track their progress in addressing global challenges like poverty, clean energy, and climate change.

For many however, effectively tracking and measuring their overall impact remains elusive, especially when many have different philanthropic program types (i.e. employee volunteering, donations, fundraising, etc.). How for instance, do you track overall impact if your volunteer programs use volunteer hours as a base metric, while your donation program uses Euros raised to track progress?

In a 2018 interview in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), UN Foundation President and CEO Kathy Calvin spoke about one of the key barriers in data tracking. “A core challenge within the philanthropic community is that there isn’t enough data on where the [money is] flowing vis-à-vis the SDGs, or enough transparency on what impact [it's] having.”

To address this challenge, SmartSimple and America’s Charities released a Goal Tracker module as part of its launch of their newest CSR management solution, Engage. Entirely unique, Engage was developed with the objective of helping organisations tell the complete picture of their global impact.

The Goal Tracker module, enables you to take any of your activities, be it grant funding, volunteering, or donations, and track it against each specific UN SDG goal. Baseline KPIs in the Goal Tracker module give organisations a place to start, but the real power and insight comes from organisations adding their own unique KPIs. Through the Goal Tracker module, you’re able to track and report on anything from Euros donated, volunteer hours, to meals served or number of trees planted.  

Within each SDG goal, organisations are able to drill down into each activity type, be it campaign, event or grant to see their metrics. So for a volunteer event, you’d be able to see the number of volunteers, hours contributed, and total Euros spent in wage equivalency so you can have one standardized unit of measure to aggregate your total impact across all of your activities (Euros contributed).

A variety of charts and graphs ties all the data together and can be exported for easy sharing. At the end of the day, the Goal Tracking module can manage any sort of impact tracking need you might require, with the broader Engage solution giving you the ability to manage all of your corporate philanthropic activities from one central system.

SmartSimple recently released a short Goal Tracker video demonstrating all of the capabilities mentioned in this article that’s well worth a viewing.


Tune in to learn more


SmartSimple EMEA's Managing Director, Brendan Bradley, was recently interviewed by Dublin City FM where he discussed goal tracking, and the UN SDGs among other things. You can listen to the full radio interview below. 

 

Get started with Goal Tracking


To learn more about goal tracking or to set up a demo, visit our Engage page or email us directly at unsdg@smartsimple.com.

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