by Jenny

Outcomes, Dashboards and Cupcakes: Our presentation at the Australia and New Zealand Addiction Conference

While there’s still a detailed write up to come exploring our shared outcomes journey with Windana Drug and Alcohol Recovery, in the meantime we wanted to share our joint presentation from last month’s Australia and New Zealand Addiction Conference.

In it, we cover how we broke down the somewhat daunting task of implementing an organisation-wide Outcomes Measurement Framework, as well as key lessons when it comes to the support and resources needed to make Outcomes Measurement a streamlined and welcome part of everyday work. Read More

by Jenny

The Need for Shared Approaches to Measurement in the Alcohol and Other Drugs sector

Last month I had the privilege of sharing learnings with two leading community agencies working in the alcohol and other drugs (AOD) sector in Southeast Melbourne.

While it was a highly informative evening, in some ways it raised more questions than it answered, especially when it came to responsibility for working across the sector and developing shared outcomes measurement frameworks. Read More

by Emma Thomas

The Sorting Hat of Indicators: A Wizarding Approach to Shared Measurement

When it comes to measuring collaborative and collective impact, we’re often asked: how can we make it easier for organisations to learn from each other, save money on evaluation costs, and build an evidence base of what works? While strictly speaking, this can’t be achieved with the wave of a magic wand, we’ve found that a shared approach to measurement – where organisations apply the same indicator or set of indicators of change to a common area of work – can deliver some pretty magical results. Read More

by Jenny

Are you outcomes ready for 2018/19? 3 things you need to do now

It’s hard to imagine, but we are already beginning to think about budgets and plans for FY2018/19.

For those of us in the social impact space, that means we need to get real about getting our organisations ready to demonstrate outcomes, and consider the resources needed to support this.

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by Jenny

Is Developmental Evaluation just rapid feedback? Join the Masterclass, join the conversation.

I have heard “Developmental Evaluation” (DE) described many, many different ways since Michael Quinn Patton coined the term in his 2010 book of the same name.

According to some of these descriptions: it’s a way to record our journey so far; it’s about “developmental moments”; it’s rapid feedback; it’s action learning re-packaged; and/or it’s the same as formative evaluation, linked to innovative and complexity which can be used to achieve scale and so on.
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by Jenny

Is Outcomes Measurement ‘Real Work’?

The other day someone told me that they didn’t want to be taken away from the ‘real work’ to collect data for outcomes measurement.

As someone who has dedicated their career to measurement and evaluation I had to take a deep breath. As someone who has seen the real difference made by outcomes measurement to program impact, I had to take another breath… Read More

by Jenny

Working in Concert: The Orchestra, The Jazz Band and the Festival Line Up

The Collective Impact framework has a lot to offer agencies seeking large-scale, systems-level change to complex problems.

However, it can sometimes be challenging to know where to start. That’s why we’ve written up some of the ways we think collective impact can be considered – do you want the orchestra, the jazz band or the festival line up approach?… Read More

by Jenny

Top Five Trends in Social Impact Measurement in 2017

I love the summer break for reflecting on trends in the measurement and evaluation space (no, really – I do!) So, here are the top five trends in social impact measurement for 2017.

1. Big data
Big data is everywhere. But what is it? Big data is data sets so huge that they require more complex methods, applications and programs to analyse them… Read More