Hands-on Practical Guide for Social Impact Measurement

A supplementary resource linked to ZMINA:Resilience Capacity Building Webinar #3: Foundation of Impact: Monitoring and Evaluation. This guide was developed within the RESIST project — a Baltic Sea Region initiative focused on building social innovation ecosystems — in which Webinar #3 trainer Paula Cukura served as project lead for impact measurement work.

The guide is structured as a self-assessment workbook built around three core steps: understanding the challenge you are addressing (who is affected, where, and why it matters), identifying social change at individual, community, and structural levels, and selecting appropriate indicators — with a deliberate quality-first approach that treats social change itself as the primary indicator rather than defaulting to quantitative data. Each section includes a fillable one-pager template for immediate practical use. This focus directly complements Paula's session, which introduced the Theory of Change as a planning tool and argued that M&E is a strategic learning instrument, not a reporting obligation.

Paula references this framework in the webinar as part of her broader practice in impact strategy development. Participants who want to move from the session's conceptual foundations to hands-on structured self-assessment will find this guide the most practical next step. The guide is one output of the broader RESIST project; more information and additional resources are available at interreg-baltic.eu/project/resist.