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.

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.

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!)