If you’ve ever donated to RDA or paid a rider fee, have you ever wondered how hard that money is working?
We exist as an organisation because of the generosity of our volunteers, and the many community and corporate sponsors who provide financial support through donations or sponsorship to fund our operaitons.
That Financial support doesn't just happen, we continuously approach potential donors and sponsors to ask for their financial support. However we are one of many organisations knocking on doors for funds, so how can donors and sponsors assess the value we provide to the community and gauge that value against others asking for their funding?
We decided to find out and working with NZ RDA and Impact Labs undertook to quantify the benefits we provide.
Impact Labs have developed a statistical process that calculates a tangible Social Return on Investment (SROI) by analysing an organisation’s information against a library of impact values, research, effectiveness, and data. The result is a GoodMeasure Report, that
enables us to value and communicate the good we are achieving for the populations we serve.
Impact Lab took our North Shore RDA data, plus that of five other NZ RDA groups. They accessed other data sources that provide input to help calculate the savings made in a social context, as a result of our interaction with a rider, for instance;
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Improvements in physical health, less interaction with medical care
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Improvements in mental health, better social interaction and integration
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Improved achievement in school
At a point in the Riders life journey, they join an RDA Group and things begin to improve for them, changing the potential long-term outcome for them as an individual. It is this change that we try to capture and measure the positive change as shown is the graph on the right.
Impact Lab calculated that across the NZ RDA groups analysed, they found a Social Return on Investment of 320%
In other words, every $100 dollars invested in delivering the NZRDA programme generates an estimated $320 of measurable benefits to each rider. The GoodMeasure calculation also confirmed that NZ RDA contributes positively to the mental health, physical health and academic achievements of riders. If you would like to read more on this, check out the NZ RDA flyer on the study here
