Measuring the Impact and Value of Public Services
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This document discusses the importance of demonstrating impact for organizations that receive public funding. It notes key issues like austerity, transformation of public services, and the importance of evidence. Impact refers to broad or long-term effects, while outcomes are intermediate changes and outputs are direct services or activities. Popular appeal, evidence of results, and stories are important. Barriers include limited capacity for data collection and lack of clarity on funder requirements. Effective ways to show impact include press releases, social media, research findings, stories, and collecting data. Examples provided include case studies, annual reports with client data, newsletters with stories of changed lives, and statistics showing changes in areas like crime rates or healthcare utilization. Support desired includes standardized measurement tools,
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Measuring the Impact and Value of Public Services
- 1. The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing Carolyn Barber Wayfinder Associates
- 2. Issues of the day • Contract culture • Payment by results • Shrinking of local government • Austerity • Big Society • Transformation in delivery models of public services • The Internet • Social enterprise
- 3. What do we mean by ‘impact’ • Impact – broad or longer term effects of project or organisation’s work • Outcomes – intermediary changes contributing to impact • Experiences – how people feel about being involved with services • Outputs – services, projects, activities – not impacts, designed to achieve them
- 4. What do we look for? • Popular appeal • What works • Evidence of results • Stories • Engagement
- 6. What’s important about demonstrating impact? • Showing distance travelled - progress • Showing results – reduced admission, less offending etc • Evidence that outcomes for client achieved • Communicating and telling stories • To secure funding • To ensure funding is spent effectively • To ensure funding makes a difference
- 7. Barriers 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Limited capacity to collect and analyse… Little knowledge about monitoring and… Lack of interest Confusion about what is required by… Uncertainty about using social media
- 8. Other barriers • Agreeing a methodology for measuring impact that’s recognised by funders • Time and lack of awareness of importance of showing commissioners the impacts • Impact not always immediately measurable • Difficult to show impact of ‘soft’ skills • In a small town, we have to be careful individuals can’t be identified
- 9. How to show you’re making a difference 0 2 4 6 8 10 Press releases Social Media Research findings Sharing stories Stakeholder reports Collecting data Gathering feedback Not at all effective Quite effective Very effective
- 10. Examples of impact • Case study on volunteer who radically changed behaviour • An annual report based on data from 11000 clients • Quarterly newsletter – telling stories about how young people’s lives have changed • A move to independent living • Video of service users participating and giving feedback • Evaluation framework and reports • Annual review for local CCG about volunteer car scheme • Change of local crime statistics • Reputation of service
- 11. Examples of impact • Peace of Mind clinic – data shows prevention of admission and enabling discharge • Using Facebook to build up following and share information about our social enterprise, Bicycle Recycling • Waste used • Involvement of service users in recruitment of staff, designing new services, acting as peer mentors • Evaluation of deaf awareness educational service • Workshop based on service user’s journey • Statistics relating to client rated goals • Outcome data from floating support services • Effective Annual Impact reports
- 12. Examples of impact • Numbers learning to cook • Service users becoming involved in their community • Evaluation of YouTube videos, using social media to promote survey • Film footage of service users talking about the difference service has made to their lives and ability to maintain independence
- 13. What support would help? • Standard baseline measure or system – a list of what works with examples • Less valued by funders as crisis services have become priority • How to get the right balance between ‘in your face’ media and ‘just getting on with it’ ... • Standardised tool eg. Supporting People Quality Assessment Framework • Marketing expertise • Free seminars for professionals to discuss impact • Avoiding identification is important for services operating in small rural communities where numbers are not high – support in how to do this and promote impact at the same time would be helpful.
- 14. What next? • Key to the future is engagement • Will this be marketing driven? • Or led through participation and collaboration? • Price or Value?
- 15. Any questions?
Editor's Notes
- Title of my presentation reflects what I think is a fundamental dilemma of post modern social care.When I started in social work a great deal of public funding was spent on institutional care, There were residential schools, loads of children’s homes, huge hospitals for people with mental illness and learning disabilities. And with those once you were in it was pretty hard to ever get out again. My first proper job was in a psychiatric hospital where women who became pregnant in their teens were still incarcerated 50 years later. In those days no one knew the cost of anything but value was seen in a completely different way. Or was it? The value to society at large was that people who presented ‘social problems’ could be tucked out of sight and out of mind.Nowadays in our social care contract culture, all our services are costed down to the last detail. Commissioners represent the public demand of value for money – but there’s an ever increasing gap between the government rhetoric of always doing something to sort out any problems, and the reality of spending as little as possible on the services being provided. Recently a friend was talking to me about trying to get services to support her father who was mentally unwell. She had read about all the support flagged up by the NHS website and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get access to all this locally. When I said she’d done well to get support from a community psychiatric nurse she was really relieved. The reality of an over stretched, under-resourced local mental health service chimed with her experience, rather than the illusory picture she’d found on the internet.In the meantime a lot of activity and energy goes on in communities which is unrecognised and undervalued by policy makers and commissioners at local and national government level.
- This is of course what the Big Society represents, and we know that there are masses of activities which depend entirely on volunteers, that Neighbourhood Watch helps reduce crime, that thousands of people are ‘carers’ looking after partners, children, parents who are disabled or unwell, that people create new groups and raise funds, inspired by their own experiences. I can’t begin to do justice to all the activity that goes on but suffice to say the very fabric of our society absolutely depends on this common effort. The only problem (I’ve heard it said)with the idea of the Big Society is that it came out of David Cameron’s mouth!So let’s just take a look at some of the issues we’re all too aware of today, and that affect the funding culture of public service delivery, in particular social care.Contract culture – turns the larger voluntary sector organisations into competitors and reduces their scope for campaigning and collaboration.Payment by results effectively excludes the voluntary sector and helps promote large private corporations.What we’ve known as the basis for delivering public services is dramatically changing, and there are many new ideas jostling for attention. The internet may be global but it also facilitates very local initiatives. Personalisation and social enterprise bring new, more empowering approaches into the arena of social care and support.Which brings us to the whole idea of demonstrating impact? If small, local, personalised and community based represents a future for social care and support, how do we know what’s working and what isn’t?
- So let’s get some definitions out of the way. An organisation I’ve come across recently who are very concerned with impact are Time to Change, the campaign to challenge stigma and discrimination against mental ill-health. They’ve commissioned research, studied the results of their efforts in terms of changing attitudes, and they in turn only commission projects which they can see encourage the maximum number of conversations about mental health. The other side of the coin is that they’ve become more and more prescriptive about funding local projects because of the drive to increase impact.The reality is that most smaller voluntary organisations and community groups make a contribution to impact along with other initiatives. Local government commissioners are ideally placed to look at overall impact, but are often limited in their perspective by the demands of contracting out services. Even ‘outcomes’ which as researchers you’ll be very familiar with, is quite an alien concept to smaller organisations and groups – although I often think they’re more alienated by the language than the actuality. After all what usually inspires and motivates people to keep going is the visible difference they can see.Which brings us to ‘experiences’ which is probably the bread and butter of most evaluation on a community level, and outputs which is familiar and safe territory for commissioners, funders and most organisations big and small.
- There are two distinct interpretations of the term ‘impact’. One is related to the social changes brought about, and the other relates to how well publicised or popular activities are. There are funding streams now which directly draw on popular appeal. Projects battle it out on TV or in newspapers and the voters decide. Commissioners or funders might be more interested in activities based on the ‘what works’ principle, usually based on large scale research findings such as the example of Time to Change. The danger of this is that what works even for most people, doesn’t work for all. I’m reminded of the woman who came to one of my group sessions, intensely anxious. She said she’d already done two courses of CBT which hadn’t helped, and felt that somehow she was the one who’d failed. Evidence of results is something most small organisations and groups can identify as useful but the practicalities of collecting and analysing data remain challenging especially if no one will fund this activity. And the emphasis is very much around doing, not analysing which is seen as an administrative function.Stories are particularly important for popular appeal, for motivating stakeholders ,staff and volunteers, and they can usually capture the ethos or sense of purpose behind the activities, and they help to stimulate engagement. Engagement, or finding ways of getting people to identify with your cause, or activity, is, I would suggest, the most influential factor in demonstrating impact – in both senses of the word, in terms of evidencing change and in terms of publicising it.
- This was my effort at engagement as part of the preparation for this presentation. Using the renowned Survey Monkey, I circulated a short survey on my social networking sites and via contacts, and asked for feedback about demonstrating impact. Nine different organisations responded, all local, but with considerable variation in size – from a large organisation involved in a great deal of Supporting People work, to a small social enterprise growing vegetables and offering an outlet for local arts and crafts.
- So let’s take a look at what they said. These answers are all fairly predictable, and pretty much based on the idea that where there’s public funding there should be accountability.Interestingly the impact is all about telling other people. Maybe it also needs to be about telling ourselves we’re doing a good job, that what we’re doing is meaningful and worthwhile. ‘What’s the point?’ was a question I used to annoyingly ask of my team as a manager in a local voluntary organisation several years ago.
- What were the main barriers they perceived? Clearly the issue of capacity comes up across the board. And confusion is the next issue of concern. Most small organisations will have funds from different sources, with varying expectations of evaluative feedback and data collection.
- Some other comments I found interesting. One is suggesting a common methodology for measuring impact. Others highlight the difficulties with this – not immediately measurable, and the soft skills question.The last comment I was intrigued by, and in a way this is the opposite of the momentum towards engagement. This anxiety about identifying people may be based on the traditional script of stigma associated with accessing services, but it also reflects important concerns around confidentiality and data protection.
- Here I asked people what they thought were effective methods. Gathering feedback and sharing stories gained 100% of ‘very effective’ responses – so clearly the experiences we talked about earlier are perceived as a critical activity to demonstrate impact.
- I asked each respondent to come up with three examples which they thought demonstrated impact. The examples in red are those representing stories about service users. The blue one represent examples of data showing impact. The green are those answers I’m not sure how to categorise, and there’ are two responses in purple which actively used engagement through social networking.
- These are some suggestions about what support would help. Standardised measures sound like a good idea, and perhaps people here have a better knowledge than I about how realistic this is, and whether there is work going on already around this. The issue of ‘marketing’ is an ethical dilemma for many small voluntary organisations and groups, as one respondent suggests, and there’s a hint of the ever present tensions between valuing preventive work and dealing with crisis management.
- My own view is that in these changing times, engagement is the key to demonstrating impact, both in terms of collecting evidence and in terms of publicity. Engagement doesn’t need to be an add-on extra, it can be built in to the way in which community projects and local services are developed and delivered.Engagement can be driven through marketing, as all the big corporations now know... Or it can be led through developing relationships and valuing people’s input.So what does engagement look like?Networking – real time and on-line - with supporters and potential partnersCollaboration and cooperation – with other groups, organisations and enterprisesCo-production – with service users, volunteers, staff and supportersI recently did some work with a Head of a local secondary school about engaging with parents. He saw this as a major challenge and couldn’t see how to take it forward. After an hour of working through a simple framework, we identified the existing strengths and where development was needed, and he was able to write a meaningful and realistic strategy. Engagement is more about a change of mind set than requiring extra resources , but mind set s are notoriously hard to shift at times.Let’s focus on what we really value about social care in the community, and use the tools we have available to actively engage support and demonstrate the kind of impact which is priceless.