We need to focus on what works best and what older people want. We already have some great projects that are models of good practice, so we want to build and improve those models and reproduce them across more communities. We also want to learn from good practice in other organisations and adopt what works and what older people really want.

In our determination to do what we can for people in our communities we often find that we take on more than we can deliver. So our resources become stretched and we're so busy trying to do our best at all the things we're committed to, we don't have the time to look up and see how we can improve and develop our services for the future.

If we are going to achieve our goals we need to develop our services so they are built around what older people say they want, rather than the way we have always done things.

Indeed, we'll only attract new funding from government and other sources if we show that we have listened to what older people need in a community and are building our services around those needs.

And we'll only keep that funding if we can prove that we are having the impact on older people's lives that we say we are. Organisations often fail to set aside the resources to measure the impact they are having, and it is often difficult to measure how the support we provide makes a difference to older people's health or well-being. However, we recognised how important it was to do this in the future, so we brought in a research company in 2008 to help us develop a simple and effective way to measure the difference we are making.

This initial social impact study shows that there is a simple approach we can use to measure the difference we are making. It is built on asking the people who benefit from our services how it affects their lives. In the initial study 90 per cent of them said WRVS makes their lives better. The social impact study has developed a model that we can start using throughout WRVS to show the impact we are making. It will help us to attract new funding and support, and will help us keep track of what services are making the biggest difference in older people's lives in the future.