Unlike physical improvements, it is sometimes difficult to see the impact of services, so everyone has to work harder to find out how they are making a difference. Neighbourhood workers need good service performance information, and residents can add a lot of value by providing qualitative feedback. As well as traditionally monitoring systems, it is also possible design services with incentives for improvement built in – such as ‘payments by results’ methods.
In EC1, a range of methods were employed to understand the impact of funding: regular outputs monitoring of projects, specific research and evaluation projects, a face-to-face household survey of all residents, and focus groups. There was a dedicated research and intelligence manager whose job was to make sense of the findings from this and, importantly, to work with mainstream providers to make better use of existing data collection. In addition to all this, we also tried linking some funding to performance – with money following the individual rather than the provider.
Outcome is getting increasing emphasis in the voluntary and community sector, with funders wanting to see more hard evidence of impact. However, at the same time funding constraints mean the resources to do this properly are often not there. More emphasis needs to be put into building evaluation into operational delivery.
