Welcome to our November newsletter! We feel very inspired after last week's Annual Conference, The Emerging Profession and have lots of updates for you, including a conference summary and the latest impact news.

We are also delighted to see so many of you renewing your membership, and welcome to all our new members! Take a look at our current membership list on our website.

SIAA's Annual Conference ended last week in Berlin, with SIAA Chairman Jeremy Nicholls encouraging everyone to stand and repeat together "Ich bin ein sozialer Wirkungsanalyst" (I am a social impact analyst). This participation really summed up the feel of the day; interactive and good humoured!

Highlights from the day included:

• Opening keynote from Kate Ruff, of Charity Intelligence Canada, who adeptly drew on examples from financial accounting to help examine the need for social impact analysis.
• A musical chairs style Hotspots session, where delegates moved between 14 experts who presented specific metholologies, tools and case studies from the field
• SIAA members from Austria, Spain and Hungary discussed local support for impact analysts and SIAA country impact groups.

....and there was much more!

Our full conference report will be published in December. In the meantime you can see videos from the conference via our YouTube channel here with more to come shortly.

Our conference programme highlighted lots of tricky questions around social impact analysis. To continue these discussions we want to collect topical blogs for a post-conference series. If you feel you can provide a blog on the emerging field of impact analysis or related issues please get in touch.

You can now read our first guest blog, from Ben Rickey at NPC UK, on what it means to be a social impact analyst. 

• Christian Schober from the NPO Competence Centre in Vienna, talks about the recent launch of the Austrian country impact group here.

• Big Society Capital UK publish a market update, setting out their view of how the social investment market may evolve. Read the report here.

• The SROI Network aim to dispell some myths surrounding SROI and discuss some of its challenges in this report.

• Kieron Kirkland of the Nominent Trust UK explains how alternative story telling can help impact evaluation here.

• Read Jaan Aps' blog from Estonia on How to excite and influence…with a social impact evaluation handbook!

• The Social Impact Measurement Network Australia (SIMNA) will launch in December with the support of the Centre for Social Impact Australia.

Sandra’s 25 years of personal experience in the community and voluntary sector reflects the sector’s own changing focus over time. From simply ‘doing good’ whilst volunteering in school and university, to promoting ‘good practice’ in her paid career in the sector, her consultancy practice today is focused increasingly on outcomes, impact and social value. 

She established Whitebarn Consulting in 2005/6 with the goal of ‘helping not-for-profits to build a better world’. Whitebarn Consulting is based in Dublin and offers a range of information and support services that include the development, assessment and demonstration of social impact. Current projects include a SROI analysis of Ireland’s first and largest shared services centre for charities, and delivering ‘from outputs to outcomes’ training to a range of different voluntary groups.

Sandra is particularly interested in translating the need for, and theory of, good impact measurement to the practical reality of everyday life for most not-for-profits, and delivering ‘from outputs to outcomes’ training to a range of different voluntary groups. 

Let us know for next time! We're always happy to include recent work on social impact.

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