Many third sector and not-for-profit organisations find themselves doing amazing and necessary work in the communities in which they operate. But what does it mean if you can’t share the impact that it’s having beyond just traditional metrics, such as your number of service-users, etc.?
Our students on the SKETCH programme at Queen Mary University of London were tasked with supporting the Tower Hamlets Council for Volunteer Service [THCVS] with developing a strategy for demonstrating their social impact for a project focusing on Voluntary, Community, Faith and Enterprise Sector organisations working to reduce disparities within health and social care for ethnic minority groups in Tower Hamlets.
THCVS Health and Wellbeing Forum was developed as part of this groundbreaking project, aimed to raise the profile of these organisations working in health and social care in Tower Hamlets; particularly mental health, weight management, diabetes and long Covid. The intention was to identify key outcomes that would illustrate the impact of the interventions targeting mental health by identifying an appropriate social impact evaluation methodology to be implemented, and recommendations for an effective data strategy to ensure the right information was collected to demonstrate this.
Over the course of a one-week sprint project, two multidisciplinary teams of five students through the support of the Queen Mary Student Consultancy Programme, in collaboration with the dedicated Social Impact Unit at Queen Mary, were tasked with researching social impact methods and reviewing their efficacy in cases of evaluating mental health initiatives. They had to take into consideration the nuances presented by the geography of the initiatives (based in Tower Hamlets) and the chosen population (ethnic minority groups).
Past research available through a variety of sources, e.g. journals, articles and toolkits, was reviewed and after a thorough understanding of what worked well in a number of cases was gained, the students set about investigating methodologies and weighing which options may be the most appropriate for the task at hand.
But that was only half the challenge.
The student teams now needed to gauge what outcomes they could identify that could best fit the aims, objectives and success measures of the initiative. What was it that the THCVS Health and Wellbeing Forum want the member organisations to have experienced by being part of the initiative? What would constitute success for the initiative? How would they know there had been a marked change for the organisation from starting with the forum and over time?
Supported by the Student Consultancy Programme coaches, students were able to road-test and brainstorm potential solutions and ideas that could be applied in the case of the THCVS Health and Wellbeing Forum. By surfacing the outcomes that could be mapped to the initiative they were then able to develop strategies for data collection that would support THCVS to showcase the achievements of the Health and Wellbeing Forum.
The sprint culminated in two presentations led by the student teams to the internal staff team at THCVS and the Queen Mary Student Consultancy team, where they were able to share their key insights and findings from their analysis. They shared their recommendations for future data collection and a social impact evaluation model to implement that would be best to present its achievements. The two teams were able to share their work and the Tower Hamlets Council for Voluntary Service were able to compare and contrast the approaches taken by the students.
Impressed with the work the Queen Mary students produced, the Tower Hamlets Council for Voluntary Service are continuing to work with us by taking the recommendations made and working towards their implementation. The THCVS is currently working on a longer-term, 12-week project in collaboration with our Student Consultancy Programme, to review current practice and initiate new data collection processes to support their aims.