TLDR. Six counts, in this order: households furnished, individuals in those households, items delivered, tonnes diverted, agency referrals, volunteer hours. Write down your definition of each one and do not change it. Those six will satisfy most funders, run any forecasting tool you are handed, and take a spreadsheet. Outcome surveys come after, not before.
You do not need software, a consultant or a framework to start. You need six numbers and a written definition of each.
The definitions matter more than the numbers, and that is the part almost everyone skips.
Start with these six
Count these for a single twelve-month period. Pick the period once and use the same one every year.
- Households furnished. How many separate homes received furniture from you.
- Individuals served. Every person living in those homes, counted separately, including children.
- Items delivered. Total pieces of furniture and household goods that left your building and reached a client.
- Tonnes diverted. Weight of furniture that reached a client rather than a landfill.
- Agency referrals. How many clients came through a referring agency, and how many agencies referred.
- Volunteer hours. Hours worked by volunteers on the furniture service, plus the hourly rate you would have paid to hire that work.
That is the whole starting list. If you can produce those six for last year, you are ahead of most organizations in this sector, including some considerably larger than yours.
The definitions are where it goes wrong
Two furniture banks can both report “500 families served” and mean entirely different things.
One counts a household every time a delivery goes out, so a family that came back for a bed in March and a table in September counts twice. The other counts unique households. One counts the four people in the apartment. The other counts the one person who signed the referral form.
Neither is wrong. They are just not the same number, and the moment either of them appears in a funder report or a benchmark, the difference stops being harmless.
Write your definitions down in a single document. Two lines each. Date it. When someone new takes over the reporting in three years, that document is the only thing standing between your trend line and a break in it that nobody can explain.
What to add second
Once the six counts are stable for a full year, add outcomes. Not before.
An outcome is a change a person experienced, which means you have to ask them. The standard approach is a short survey roughly ninety days after delivery, asking whether specific things changed: sleeping better, worrying less about money, feeling safer at home, being able to invite people over.
Keep it short and keep it voluntary. The people you are surveying have just come through a housing transition, and the ethical floor is that saying no changes nothing about their access to your service.
Ready-made survey instruments for clients, furniture donors and referring agencies exist, so you do not have to write your own. If you want ours, get in touch and we will send them.
What not to bother with
Some measurement is genuinely not worth your time at your size.
Longitudinal tracking of clients over multiple years requires consent management and follow-up capacity you do not have. Inferential statistics, correlation and regression, need sample sizes a small furniture bank will not reach for years. Detailed demographic breakdowns beyond what your referral form already captures add reporting burden and privacy risk for very little return.
And you do not need a social return on investment ratio. Tracking outputs and a handful of core outcomes is a complete and defensible impact practice on its own, and no funder worth having will reject it because it lacks a dollar-per-dollar figure.
An SROI ratio is an optional method for organizations that already have the counts and the outcome data in place. It is not the entry point, and treating it as one is the most common way small charities lose a year.
The detailed version, for those who want to understand exactly how this works
The six counts are chosen for a specific reason. They are the inputs a forecasting model needs.
A forecast SROI applies a set of financial proxies to output counts. The counts feed the model; the proxies come from somewhere else. That means the quality of any forecast you produce is capped by the quality of those six numbers, and no amount of methodological sophistication downstream will repair a household count that was assembled from memory in December.
There is a further reason to get individuals and households counted separately. Most valuation models treat an individual outcome and a family outcome differently, because the change a child experiences from getting a bed is not the same change the parent experiences. If you only have one of the two figures, half the model cannot run.
Weight is the count most organizations skip, because weighing furniture is a nuisance. It is also the only one that connects your work to municipal diversion policy and to corporate environmental reporting, which are two of the larger funding conversations available to this sector. A rough per-item weight schedule applied consistently is far better than nothing.
What we still do not know
There is no agreed sector definition of cost per household furnished, which is the number funders ask for most often.
The two figures in public circulation illustrate the problem rather than solving it. Furniture Bank of Central Ohio states that each family receives goods worth up to $1,400, and that it costs about $1,300 per family to secure, pick up, store and deliver furniture. Furniture Bank Toronto states that each person moving into an empty apartment needs a minimum of $8,000 to turn empty housing into a furnished home.
Those measure completely different things. One is a charity’s delivery cost per family, the other is the total resources a person needs to establish a home. They should never be averaged, ranged or presented as a spread, and we would rather flag that than publish a tidy number that means nothing.
Fixing this needs five to ten furniture banks to agree what goes in the numerator and what counts as a household in the denominator, then publish one year of data with the definitions attached. Until that happens, treat any published cost-per-household figure, including ours, as a description of one organization’s accounting.
One next step
Write down your six definitions this week. Once you have a year of clean counts, you can produce a forecast estimate of your social value here: SROI Forecast Calculator.
References
- Furniture Bank of Central Ohio. Furniture Bank Network directory listing. furniturebanks.org
- Furniture Bank. Our impact. furniturebank.org
- Common Approach to Impact Measurement. commonapproach.org
- Common Impact Data Standard. commonapproach.org
- Charity Navigator. Furniture Bank of Central Ohio (EIN 311600869). charitynavigator.org
