Visualising data

We've been thinking for a while about how Lamplight might be able to help you visualise and reflect on the data it produces in reports.  Tables of figures are all very well, and charts can help, but can sometimes be difficult to tell the whole picture.  Infographics (this is one of my favourites, at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net) can help to tell a fuller story.

We're not claiming the beauty of some of the best infographics, and this is just a first effort at helping to make sense of the data that's there (a 'straightforward' Lamplight outcomes report generates up to 18 different statistics for each outcome measure).  Perhaps some of the 'beauty' of this is that Lamplight generates this in one click from your standard reports...

In the first part, the background bar is scaled to the minimum and maximum possible values for the measure, and the arrow shows the average start and average end scores for all our service users (of course this is fictional data).  The second chart shows some distribution: the width of the arrows is proportional to the number of people that saw positive or negative (or no) change; the height is proportional to the amount of change they saw (on average).

We'd be really interested to hear feedback on whether this helps, and what other measures and graphics might also be useful.

Open Data

Sarah's written a piece on open data in the voluntary sector, which has just come out in Lasa's Computanews.

"Open data can enhance accountability, transparency and learning for charities and voluntary organisations. At the same time it presents a series of challenges to the sector. Technical expertise, time and fear are all factors but without the data standards to back it up the open data movement threatens to keep its insights closed."

Read the rest here...

Outcomes Monitoring as Therapy?

Outcomes and impact mearsurement have become hot topics and for good reason: if you want funding you have to show me why you deserve it. What do you do? What do you achieve? What makes your organisation a good (social) investment? Funders and donors offer support, guidelines, frameworks and systems to help organisations to properly evaluate and monitor their work and best show off their achievements and thus achieve more funding (See the recent NPC blogpost Caring and Sharing).

But there is a danger that with this approach, especially among the smaller charities, outcomes and impact monitoring becomes something external, something imposed from the outside. There is a fear of looking too closely as inevitably the bad will be revealed with the good - I heard this view last week at a meeting to oppose cuts to local services. After listing all the amazing things that the organisation had achieved the chair of the meeting expressed the view that monitoring outcomes was a trick imposed by the government to legitimise cuts. Evaluation and monitoring wasn't something they needed to do, it was something someone else wanted them to do.

So why Outcomes Monitoring as therapy? Well, therapy helps you identify the good as well as the bad. To see what's working and to see what needs to change. And you have therapy for yourself, not because your employer or your spouse or your father tells you to. But the effects trickle over into everything: more confidence; better working practices; stronger relationships.

So while organisations will still need to convince their funders that they are value-for-money they can do that because they know who they are, what they do and how and why they do it well. The motivation for outcomes monitoring must come from within the organisation, only then can funders and donors see an organisation at its best.

Charities Evaluation Service - new review of IT systems

Charities Evaluation Service have just published an ICT overview document helping voluntary organisations that are thinking about using a system to help with their monitoring and evaluation.

There's some useful advice about how to approach this, questions to ask, resources you'll need.

We're also pleased to come out really well!  Fourteen different systems have been reviewed independently and Lamplight was (joint) highest ranked - and all but one of the others cost much more!  So Lamplight gets you as much as the more expensive systems out there.

This is the first time that we're aware of that there's been an attempt to assess and compare different systems.  Up til now we fairly frequently get asked "who are your competitors and why are you better" - which is always a curious question to be asked!  So we're sure that this independent review will help organisations choosing a system.

(A bit more detail on the comparison: systems were ranked high, medium or low on flexibility, outcomes management, data security, and support.  Six of the 14 systems scored 3-high 1-medium, including Lamplight.  Twelve of those fourteen systems are in the 'medium' or 'high' cost bands.  Lamplight also has the second-shortest contract length at 3 months.  The research was carried out during Autumn 2010.)

The comparison document is here.

Bexley Snap join the Lamplight family

We don't often make much of a public fuss when an organisation starts using Lamplight - so it's nice of the organisation (Bexley SNAP) and NCVO to do so for us!  We're (obviously) really pleased that they chose Lamplight and are really looking forward to working with them...

Impact impact everywhere

Maybe it's just what I tend to read, but it feels like there's been more and more about voluntary sector impact around the place recently.  Last Thursday the Guardian ran an overview piece looking briefly at how any why impact measurement is important.

Of course New Philanthropy Capital have been working on this for ages - and they blogged earlier this month about work they're starting on standardising impact (/outcome) measures.  This is a good thing, in our view, but doesn't need inventing from scratch, and crucially needs to be 'free' - measures should be free for any and all to use.  The value of this sort of work would be much increased if data formats could also be agreed to easily allow #opendata learning and benchmarking.

Often the angle that these discussions come from is funding - like this one from NCVO discussing new forms of funding (e.g. social impact bonds) and the link with outcomes, and a similar brief on new forms of funding from Third Sector Foresight.  This is clearly a valid and important perspective (and again from the funders mouth itself - this time the Chief Exec of the Big Lottery Fund) - but it seems rarely to be said that understanding your impact is a good thing for staff, trustees, and probably beneficiaries of a charity too.  We'd like to hear a bit more about these internal benefits.

So my sense is that impact/outcome measures are going to become more and more important.  And in my view, NPC are correct that standards are really important in this discussion.

Firstly, it can be really hard to measure some of this stuff.  At least, it's hard to do well.  Using measures and approaches that have been developed and tested rigorously makes sense.

Secondly, all these measures are of little use at all if they are not communicated, internally and externally.  If you're developing your own impact measures, you've got to explain what and how and why you're measuring, as well as the results.  Which means you'll lose people.  If a set of standards emerges that become more generally understood by trustees, staff, funders and others, it becomes much easier to talk about your impact. And if those standards are trusted (which they'll really need to be) questions over methodology etc. should all-but disappear.

Thirdly, they allow comparison.  This is clearly more controversial: charity league tables anyone?  Martin Brookes at New Philanthropy Capital has spoken and written roughly along these lines - though ranking causes, not individual charities.  But one of the things NPC does is evaluate (ie compare) charities for funders.

There are two kinds of comparison: competitive (we're better than you) and collaborative (what can we learn from you?).  The second shouldn't be too scary.  The first happens already - whenever a funder makes a choice to fund one organisation and not another - it's just that the comparison and process is fairly opaque.  So perhaps it shouldn't be something to be scared of.

This kind of benchmarking would help organisations identify, communicate and celebrate their strengths, and know who to learn from to address weaknesses (or what to stop doing).  It will be rather controversial and perhaps painful.  But will it be a good thing?


[Tuesday 22nd update] The Guardian had a Q&A on this today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector-network/2011/mar/18/q-a-measuring-impact?commentpage=all#end-of-comments and http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23volsecqa (though not much action on twitter).

NCVO conference- Stuart Etherington's state of the sector

At the NCVO conference Stuart Etherington, Chief Exec of NCVO has just given his keynote talk on the 'State of the Sector'.

I'm not sure how far his opening call that we should not be 'blighted by fear' resonated in the room.  While acknowledging and addressing the short-term challenges, we were encouraged to stop worrying about what the Big Society is and get on a do it.

Anyway, here's some immediate highlights:

Around £13 billion of the sectors' £35bn income comes from the state: so one argument put is that the sector has become overly dependent on the state, and that cutting funding will be A Good Thing by giving the voluntary sector it's independence.  Stuart's counter is that three-quarters of public funding is in the form of contracts - so in fact the state is dependent on the sector.

Stuart summarised the Big Society as

1. the transformation of public services
2. devolution of power
3. voluntary and community action

and outlined his calls to Government to support these, including:

• The sector has great strengths (longer-term outcomes focus; innovative; close to the ground) but also weaknesses in a commissioning world - lack of financial strength (of reserves, access to capital etc).  NCVO are asking government to look at tax policy (which apparently disadvantages the sector), and 'social clauses' in contracts that recognise and reward 'social value'.
• The aims of the Localisation Bill are right; the detail is all important.  Government needs to ensure that the 'right to bid' doesn't disadvantage the voluntary sector over the private.
• Local Authorities need to produce guidelines for Local Authorities to ensure power devolves beyond the Authority and down to communities.
• The importance of campaigning by charities - some MPs dispute this.  But it's essential if power is to pass down to local communities.
• Need to look at new ways to encourage individual giving - it's high, but plateauing.
• We'll all need to look again at consortia, partnerships and mergers.

For what they're worth, some of my initial thoughts:

• Fear and anxiety can be rather crippling.  'Calls to arms' are not pointless but it's going to take more.
• Do charities depend on the state or the state on charities?  Of course it's both; there is mutual dependence, but the balance of power (as almost always) is with the state as customer.
• Social clauses rewarding social value: if it's in a contract, it's surely got to be measurable and measured.  Which is possible, but will need some standardisation.
• I think there's still too much talk of 'benefiting organisations', rather than 'benefiting people'.  If that message gets muddled then calls to government do look like special pleading; if the focus remains on people and changing lives it doesn't. 

Cuts from across the pond

Just picked up a piece in the NY Times courtesy of @WhoCares_IDo on the impact of President Obama's recent budget on non-profits in the US.  It ends with rather a good quote:

The president’s budget director, Jacob Lew, said in The New York Times: “The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.”

That's rather a good question to put to our representatives making budget decisions.

Curious Sales Technique

The sales training and mantras of "up-sell"..."add-sell"...so often taught and heard in seminar rooms and lecture halls was ignored recently! I found myself un-selling Lamplight to a customer! Is this right? Would my boss approve of my behaviour?

A recent meeting with a consortium organisation identified they were in need of a system for a new project starting. It was a project that would involve a number of other voluntary and community organisations and as a result they would need to share data and produce combined reports. In short, they wanted to reflect their combined efforts in serving their communities.

But does this mean all having to use the same system for this one project? It could result in some organisations operating multiple systems: would this be right and necessary? Surely the consequences would show staff and volunteers learning two (or more) systems and potentially duplicating data. In a time when resources are stretched, is this right? I didn't think so!

I believe we need to look to providing more efficient, affordable and suitable systems. Allow secure data sharing but not dictating a (potentially) massive organisational change. Fortunately I could recommend an alternative. The consortium organisation choose Lamplight for themselves and by having the Publishing Module, an external web-site will be linked to their Lamplight database. With their permission, information by their members will be entered and automatically transferred. All the consortium need do is send a reminder...sit back...and run the reports!

There would be obvious benefits of the member organisations adopting Lamplight with the ease of running compatible reports, data capturing and having a full case management and outcomes monitoring database, but it is not mandatory and a pre-requisite of joining the project.

Fortunately my boss agreed with my perspective!

Charities Evaluation Service - impact frameworks

Charities Evaluation Service have just published an overview of outcome frameworks available, as a free download.  We like it - it's useful background reading if you're thinking about how to measure impact.  The problem with this sort of thing - and I know CES know it - is keeping it up to date - New Philanthropy Capital have been doing some work on measuring impact on well-being of young people, and there's work going on for infrastructure organisations there and at NCVO.

We hope NPC are going to make their 'well-being' work public and freely available - the background on the methodology looks to be some of the most rigorous we've seen.  And I know that some of our customers working with young people could use it.

What to do with Impact

Just read this from Richard Piper on one of the NVCO blog:

Second, there's a critical distinction between evaluation and impact. You may have noticed that the title of this blog refers to impact, but what I've actually been talking about is evaluation. If impact and evaluation were broadly the same thing, that wouldn't be a problem. However they are very different, as I've argued elsewhere (http://bit.ly/ImpactLeadership). 'Impact' can of course be evaluated, but there are other things you can do with it that are at least as important: plan for it, deliver it, improve it, communicate it, and place it at the heart of your organisational culture.  Too many people are put off thinking about impact because they mistakenly think it’s primarily about evaluation, monitoring and measurement.

In particular, properly planning what impacts we want our organisation to create is absolutely vital if we are to fulfil our potential and really make a difference. For organisations that are new to impact thinking, one of the most common challenges is moving from asking "right, given our products, services and other outputs, what impact do we create?" to asking "right, let's decide what changes we want to make in the world, and then work out what services and outputs would best deliver that impact". Impact thinking can feel very unfamiliar and unsafe to some people who've perhaps spent years or even decades stuck in outputs thinking.  But this thinking is, in my experience, the most fundamental characteristic of genuinely successful voluntary organisations and social enterprises.

We're working with NCVO (and Richard) at the moment on their Value in Infrastructure programme - a toolkit to help infrastructure organisations plan, measure and communicate their impact.

It strikes me that impact is going to be more and more important - whatever you think of the Big Society, it does look like there might be opportunities for the third sector, eventually - but if there is, commissioning by impact may well become the norm, perhaps along the lines of the social impact bond launched a little while back.

Interesting for us, as a business too (we're revising our business plan at the mo) - the impact we want to have is 'better charities' - so what do we add to Lamplight, our training, and other services to deliver that?  I think it's always in our heads, but perhaps we should put it up front a bit more.

('Better charities' is a shorthand - not trying to sound arrogant!)

YUI Datatable statistics

Lamplight uses the YAHOO User Interface   a lot, especially datatables.  One of the things they lack, though, are footer statistics - up to now we've generated them on the server.  But to cope with editable datatables, we needed a dynamic version, so here it is on the YUI blog, with links to github for a demo and source.  And they'll be in Lamplight in the next week or two too!

Welcome

We thought it was about time we had somewhere to keep things up to date.  Here it is.  There'll be stuff about Lamplight, the third sector, perhaps some technical posts...