Impact and range

The terms ‘impact’ and ‘range’ have been circulating in the Netherlands since about 2015
Ministry Welfare, Health and Sport

The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS, our subsidy provider) has now expressed those terms in the new subsidy provision which, in 2023, will apply to to the institutional subsidy.

Until 2023, patient organisations will receive subsidy based on, among other things, the number of members. From 2019 to 2022, there will be a change to ‘impact and range’.

What is impact, what is range?

On 9 July 2018, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport presented this new policy and the following definitions:

Impact: to what extent a patient organisation impacts those who have been reached and to what extent a patient organisation influences the improvement of the situation of the people they reach.

Range: the stakeholders a patient organisation reaches, for example, the members.

One can measure the impact on the basis of the Social Return of Investment (SROI). This is a method via which social results can be converted into monetary value in order to understand the added value.

Within our context, an example of ‘range’ is the number of people we reach via an advertisement, a post on our website or a post on one of our social media accounts. When we are talking about ‘range’, what’s important is how many people have seen an advertisement. Unfortunately, you don’t know if these people find the information interesting or if they might do something with it. We are talking about impact when people take action, for example, if they ‘like’ a Facebook post or ‘share’ an article.

What do we do as an organisation?

For years, we have actively been investing in increasing our range:

  1. Via our website. We offer a lot of information (texts/photos/videos/folders/etc) and we rank high in search engines.
  2. Via our social media accounts. For example, during a conference, we share conference reports with photos.
  3. Via our newsletter. We publish a newsletter at least four times a year in both Dutch and English.
  4. Via Google AdWords ads. As a non-profit organisation we have a budget of  $10,000 (US) per month to advertise.
  5. Via Facebook ads. We can focus on specific target groups and show them our advertisements.
  6. By attending (international) conferences. This extends our network and our presentation opportunities.
  7. Through organising conferences. Our conferences are international and are visited by patients, their families and doctors.
  8. By organising family days. Our family days are international and are visited by patients and their families.

We mainly measure the impact of the activities mentioned above via statistics from our website and social media accounts (Google Analytics as well). We also conduct surveys, for example during our member conference in the Netherlands. We use paper surveys as well as online surveys.

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