New Blog Home

The Lamplight Blog can now be found on our homepage: www.lamplightdb.co.uk/blog

See you there.

Open data - a challenge

Sarah's just written about charity Open Data on the New Philanthropy Capital blog, encouraging charities to enter the (very quick and hopefully very easy Open Data Challenge).  We're asking for charities to enter their charity number and the number of people or organisations they worked with in 2011.  That's it.

We figure that this information is already in a zillion annual reports and funding applications all over the place, but never in one place.

The information entered will be publicly available, and we'll be hacking (and anyone else can too) it in due course to showcase the sorts of things that could be done once the data is there, in one place.

Getting out of the office

We're off to some impact-ey conferences soon.  Both look good, and if you go, do pop by and say hello!

The first is 'Measuring and Evaluating Outcomes in Practice', with a really good line up of speakers and sessions.  It's on 24th May in London and 29th May 2012.  Here's the whizzy discount code!

The second is a bit further away, in time and space: 13th June, in Exeter, organised by the South West Forum.  Again, a good looking line-up of speakers and workshops with a practical focus.  More info on the conference is http://www.southwestforum.org.uk/south-west-forum-conference-proving-your-impact-exeter.

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.