Creating a Baseline and Monitoring Impact
Definition
Creating a Baseline and Monitoring Impact is needed to establish what an organisation is currently achieving. It also means there is something to compare future performance with.
Guidance
Creating a Baseline and Monitoring Impact is particularly important for well-established community groups seeking to develop a building. It is obviously not possible for organisations set up specifically to develop a property to establish a baseline. However they should start to think about how they will monitor impact from the inception stage. More discussion on this can be found on the measuring impact wiki.
A baseline can be very useful in two ways:
- It helps to validate the organisation. Evidence of past achievements will encourage potential partners to engage with the development.
- It brings new focus to what the organisation is achieving and how the development will help it further its aims.
Where to start?
A simple way to create a baseline is to pick a few key outcomes the organisation has and start measuring them. This does not have to be complicated and should not take a significant amount of time. Outcomes measured will vary from organisation-to-organisation but may include:
- Number of jobs created
- Number of qualifications gained
- Number of people supported
These measurements may be crude but they are simple to collect and quantifiable. This may be enough for your purposes, but a more nuanced approach may be needed.
Many community groups have intangible impacts that are difficult to quantify. This may be improving people’s confidence or security and can have great social benefits in terms of improving health or reducing crime, but the effect is indirect.
How to measure this type of impact?
To some extent these effects cannot be fully captured by numbers on a page. One method that could be used is designing some standard surveys for people to complete. These can be used in conjunction with registration forms and given out when a person first comes into contact with the organisation. This can be followed up at periodic intervals (say every 6 months).
This allows you to track the changes people go through while involved with your organisation. There are limits to data collected in this way:
- Self-reporting errors can be made, as answers may not reflect actual feelings.
- Some people may refuse to complete the survey or it may deter them from engaging.
- Other changes could explain the changes, external to your group.
Despite these limitations this data is a useful way to monitor impact in a relatively simple fashion. A key principle to follow is to not allow these monitoring activities get in the way of your core service delivery.
This type of monitoring is also an important way of building a picture of the type of people who are benefitting from the jobs or services supplied by your organisation and development. There is a danger that regeneration projects, even in deprived area, can disproportionately benefit middle-class households.
All developments seek to improve the local area, but the best ones help people who need it most. A simple monitoring process will show if your beneficiaries are concentrated disproportionately in one sector of the community and allow you to take action to rectify this.
Depending on the size of the project and the type of stakeholder you are working with you may need a more extensive and robust evaluation of your work. This could be important in terms of validation, an external independent study often carries more weight.
Several organisations are capable of carrying out this type of work. You should put together a tender document that outlines the aims and scope of the project. Use existing networks to find likely candidates for the work. Be clear from the outset about the budget so that the tenders are realistic. There is a balance to be struck between getting an evaluation that is meaningful while at the same time not wasting money. Make sure you are comfortable with the organisation before you sign the contract.
Think carefully before getting an external organisation involved. It may meet immediate needs but it is unlikely to develop internal capacity to continue monitoring impact in the future. An alternative is the evaluation trust, which works with organisations to improve their monitoring systems.
The focus here is monitoring the impact of your organisation. Go to measuring impact for more information on how to monitor the impact of your development. There is a certain degree of overlap between the two so look at both in tandem.
What to avoid
Try not to place too great a burden on staff delivering services. Excessive monitoring can be demotivating and dampen the quality of service. Similarly avoid using the data to evaluate individual performance. Quantative analysis can often mask qualitative nuance and no evaluation system can consider every impact an organisation or person has. Where problems are identified find solutions as a team.
Do not think short-term, plan ahead. Put together a plan for monitoring performance that takes into account the resources that are available and the information you want. There is no point creating a baseline that is too costly to measure against or that has the wrong focus. Think about what will be important over the next 5 – 10 years.
External Links
The Evaluation Trust