How a website can demonstrate the social impact of your charity

Anyone who knows me, knows I can struggle with hearing or seeing organisations showing their social impact when they have missed some of the simplest tricks to boost that impact.

According to Good Finance, social impact can be defined as the effect on people and communities that happens as a result of an action or inaction, an activity, project, programme or policy.

From that we can see that social impact is such a positive thing, and all charities, community groups and CIC’s should be steeped in this, meeting the purpose that their articles set out.

The more I get involved with charities the more aware I’m becoming of the challenges faced by organisations aiming to create impact, and how whatever help can be garnered should be evaluated and welcomed.

Some are missing ways of having an immediate social impact, through ignorance, having other priorities or wanting to use budgets in other ways. By having good trustees who can support the senior operational management team, these ways can be highlighted, built into strategic plans and delivered.

With that in mind I am currently reaching out to charitable boards to inform them about something that is becoming increasingly more important and is impactful in so many ways. But what is that simple, yet impactful action, I hear you all ask?

Simply make your website accessible to everyone in the community.

At first glance, it seems a great and inclusive thing to ‘have’, ensuring that anyone whatever their disability can use your website on their own.

By opening up your website to be able to be navigated, enjoyed, used and benefitted from by everyone not only adheres to government guidelines but also increases your reach and impact, and on the commercial side, improves your brand and if it is an e-commerce site, your sales!

By making your website adhere to accessibility guidelines, you will be changing lives and bettering your service. What more impact can there be?