How do we know if and how our work makes a difference?
When work focuses on influencing, educating, inspiring, or supporting people, then an initiative doesn’t directly cause change, it makes a contribution.
We help you visualise how your activities make a difference. Using contribution analysis, we build a framework that clarifies your outcomes and impact, so that everyone can see how your work changes people’s lives.
How do we measure outcomes and impact?
Your work isn’t simple so traditional KPIs and outcome or impact measures don’t make sense on their own. You need to build a narrative and use a mix of data to evidence your impact.
We help you audit your existing data and build an assessment framework that highlights your contribution to the changes you care about and helps you build a powerful contribution story. We can help build an outcome, evaluation, research impact, performance improvement or quality assurance framework, and bring it to life in our software OutNav.
How do we use all our data and feedback to understand and evidence the difference we make?
We live in a data rich world. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by data we help you to meet the different data requirements you have and streamline this into one system, allowing you to take back control of what is important in relation to data, evidence and feedback.
We support you on a data improvement journey that will make data collection more efficient and data use more relevant, enjoyable, and meaningful.
We need an evidenced-based picture of what is working or not.
You need to understand change and bring data, evidence and feedback together to build up an evidenced picture of what is going well and where improvements are needed, or to make the case to stakeholders, funders or for accountability.
Our approach helps you set out exactly what you need to track in order to understand your work. You can streamline this with quality assurance or other approaches to improvement, so that they all come together to create one overall vision of the change you support and how it makes a difference to people.
It’s hard to demonstrate progress against strategic or national outcomes.
High level outcomes, like the ones than come from national or international frameworks or strategic outcomes, are the hardest to assess and demonstrate whether progress is being made.
We support you to align your organisation’s work and own outcomes against national and strategic outcomes to demonstrate how you contribute to these. We do this through our tried and tested outcome mapping and tracking processes.
How do we understand and highlight the contribution of different partners?
Partners work together towards the same outcomes, but it can be hard to unpick the distinctive contributions.
Our approach is especially effective for partnership working. We bring people together to create a vision for change in an outcome map, through which each partner can then highlight and track their own contribution.
It’s hard to keep everyone focused on the big picture in times of stress and uncertainty.
People get caught up in the day to day work and don’t feel they have time to look beyond to the bigger picture. You want everyone to be aligned to your mission so they can see and tell us how their work contributes to strategic aims.
Our approach enables everyone to focus on what really makes a difference rather than KPIs or targets. It helps everyone see how their work contributes to the outcomes and impacts that matter to the people and communities you serve. This can really make a positive impact on staff wellbeing as well as extending the ownership of learning and improvement across an initiative.
