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Measuring the Impact of the Bromley by Bow Centre

How much difference does your organisation make to its local area and the people you serve? Since 2009, the Bromley by Bow Centre has been seeking to answer this question through a three year evaluation project. The project seeks to measure the social impact of the Centre’s work, at project and organisational level, and with reference to benchmarks where possible. The project will prove the value of the Centre’s “community anchor” model of delivering the services that local people need over the long term. In addition, it will provide valuable insights to help us to serve local people better. In so doing, we are placing ourselves at the forefront of current practice in civil society.

The project has three main components:

1. Measuring the Centre’s Social Return on Investment (SROI)

We are working with NEF Consulting, part of the New Economics Foundation, to measure the Centre’s Social Return on Investment (SROI). We are doing this by means of a panel survey of more than 600 clients across all of the on-site services, from the GP’s surgery and health and social care services, to adult learning, to the children’s centre, to employment and welfare benefits advice. The survey will capture the difference the Centre makes overall to people’s health, family finances, empowerment, employment situation, local community and everyday lives; it will also capture how people take advantage of multiple services at the Centre at different times to help with changing needs. The SROI calculation will then attach financial values to these outcomes, to give an estimate for the return each pound spent at the Bromley by Bow Centre generates for the local community. SROI is a powerful tool which tells a story of change in people’s lives in the financial language that commissioners understand. We are looking forward to reporting on this work in autumn 2011.

2. Building the capacity of services and projects to show how they make a difference

The evaluation project has enabled some exciting work to take place across a wide range of projects to measure the difference they make for local people. In combination with the Centre’s existing feedback mechanisms, this work is helping us to prove the value of what we do. Projects to have reported so far include:

  • A pilot in vocational learning showing how learners’ self-confidence increases through their course.
  • A second pilot in the welfare and benefits, housing and debt advice service showing how people’s health and wellbeing improves as their financial worries ease.
  • Quantitative and qualitative studies of outcomes achieved in the Women’s Capability Initiative (an ESOL and Employability project) and a quantitative analysis of drivers of change for over 300 people on a PCT-funded weight management programme.
  • A qualitative study of health-related capabilities in the Children’s Centre – part of an London School of Economics master’s thesis.
  • Measuring the increases in artistic, business and practical skills of adults with physical and learning disabilities in one of our social care projects.
  • Capturing the effect of a sexual health information and advice service on people’s knowledge and confidence to discuss sexual health and access services.

This project-level work gives a hint of the kaleidoscopic diversity, breadth and depth of change the Centre’s work achieves in improving people’s health, skills, family lives and opportunities. Taken together, they show the value of the Centre’s local model.

3. Benchmarking the Centre’s services

Survey TeamHuman nature seeks to compare things, to understand the meaning of one piece of information by reference to another. The Centre is putting our exciting findings in context, by seeking out similar and contrasting organisations who are willing to compare the costs and outcomes of their work with ours. We want to know – are we effective as a delivery partner? Do our services cost more than the alternatives, and if so, do they deliver better or more long-lasting results? Only through knowing this can we seek to improve and ensure that we make the very best use of the limited resources available.

We got off to a fantastic start in this work in Autumn 2009 with a volunteer from Ashridge Business School, who completed his MBA project on this topic. Through this we involved 23 peer organisations, 5 in some detail, to gain a preliminary understanding of how to do such comparisons. We are now looking to take this to the next level and are keen to hear from volunteers and service delivering organisations who would be interested in getting involved.

The “Measuring the Impact” project is exciting for the Centre and we believe is unique in its scope and methodology in the context of an integrated community anchor organisation. While evaluation techniques are increasingly well understood, most work is done in narrowly defined areas or with specialist charities. The complexity and variety of the Centre’s work makes us highly unusual, and we hope to deliver new insights into delivering public services in deprived areas.

Sincere thanks to the Hadley Foundation for its generous support of this work and to the wonderful volunteers and staff who have given freely their time and expertise to get us this far.