CRIME REDUCTION INITIATIVES
What Views delivers
helped a session leader set up an activity or whether they supported a peer.
This method of impact reporting engages the project worker. It’s no longer viewed as a bureaucratic burden but seen as rel- evant and helpful. Many project leaders talk about the evaluation process helping their team to monitor what works and what doesn’t in their practice.
My role now is back on the outside, work- ing with Substance and Sheffield Hallam University to help monitor Positive Futures. Encouragingly, the Home Office has just confirmed £10m funding for the scheme over the next two years – a sig- nificant achievement in the current climate and an indication that the scheme is able to show its true value.
Our aim now is to roll out a new model of impact monitoring called ‘Views’ in or- der to revolutionise the traditional output focused approach to evaluation (see side panel). This new method is rooted in the day-to-day experience of frontline work-
ers. It allows them to collect, manage and articulate detailed, rich stories, changing the nature of monitoring and evaluation from imposition to empowerment. This is a difficult time for public service provid- ers. Proving the impact of your work is now critical to survival. In the new finan- cial year it’s vital that commissioners find a better way to make savings and that’s about cutting the least effective, not the easiest to cut. Telling your story has never been more important.
Neil Watson is a director of Substance, the research co-operative currently re- sponsible for evaluating Positive Futures in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University. The new Views impact moni- toring system is currently being pi- loted by four Positive Futures projects.
Neil Watson
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.views.coop
Home Office image: Steve Cadman
Views enables commissioners, funders and deliverers to store and access better quality information about their work. Frontline users are provided with automated and user-controlled functions to help them explain how their ‘outputs’ (such as delivery programmes and session attendances) contribute to personal outcomes and organisational objectives, whilst also being able to map this information against local, regional and national outcome frameworks. Real-time access to the data enables users to flexibly and intuitively query which delivery strands are achieving the best outcomes and which are delivering the best returns on investment.
Views enables grant funders to measure and understand the varying performance of funded projects. It does this by offering new ways to build real time comparative analyses of organisational performance; aggregate data across different projects, themed by multiple criteria; and encourage high levels of data quality through user-centred designs and an intuitive interface.
Views contains a range of functions to map and measure the progress of participants. The Substance Engagement and Progression Matrix and the system’s multi-media, case study and form builder tools help organisations build up detailed case histories of the development of individuals and groups, whilst also enabling them to aggregate such data and review the big picture.
This participant-focused approach frequently extends beyond the formal boundaries of specific ‘projects’ or funding arrangements and can generate a series of resources (such as attendance reports, testimonies, achievement profiles and qualitative accounts of progress) which can provide an invaluable alternative account of participant progression. Views develops this approach by enabling users to publish bespoke reports on participants which bring together the full range of quantitative and qualitative data stored against their records.
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