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...