Prove and Improve: Demonstrating impact and value in an age of austerity

Date: 02.12.2010 10:30 - 13:00

Location: NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

At a time of great pressure on the public purse it has never been more critical to show the impact and value of our public services.

For the past two years NESTA has been supporting Substance in their efforts to develop a state of the art outcome monitoring system. They created Views, a platform that helps to collect vital evidence through multiple media and makes it easier to seamlessly communicate impact and value, tailoring reports to the needs of different stakeholders.

This workshop introduced Views and hosted discussions with a range of frontline practitioners and thought leaders about how we can create a shared understanding of impact among practitioners, funders and commissioners that will encourage innovation and localism in the delivery of public services.

Speakers:

Lord Victor Adebowale, Turning Point
Chris Sherwood, NESTA
Matthew Pike, Chair of the ACEVO Commission on Personalisation
Ian Charlesworth, Social Investment Business
Clare Corran, Positive Futures Liverpool
Stephen Watt, Suffolk County Council
Tim Crabbe and Neil Watson, Substance

Evidence of impact needs to underpin a new concept of public services

Chris Sherwood set the scene with a view for the public services of the future. He said that we need to:

• open up the provider market and create spaces for new players and radically new approaches
• inject new resources in the system by redefining who has a stake in public services through new instruments for commercial and philanthropic investment and different ways of involving people in delivering basic services
• put evidence at the heart of all commissioning – and decommissioning – decisions

We need leadership if we want real change

Lord Victor Adebowale reminded us that real commissioning is rare. Procurement and contracting dominate public services and there will be no change without real commitment from leadership, as you cannot talk about service redesign in isolation from organisational culture.

Trust and collaboration for greater value

Clare Corran talked about the frustration of providers who feel micromanaged and about the importance of trust and collaboration between commissioners and providers, which need to be grounded on the common goal of achieving outcomes.

Creating locally owned services

Stephen Watt shared Suffolk county council’s experience of divesting themselves of their role of direct providers of many public services. He said that the intention is to “no longer own everything” and instead build cooperation and capacity and create locally owned services.

Whose failure is it?

Ian Charlesworth reflected that we cannot underestimate the responsibility of commissioners and the commissioning process when services fail to deliver, yet the blame is most often targeted at service providers. Are we identifying clearly the outcomes that services need to achieve?

Social Impact will be at the heart of everything we do

Matthew Pike predicted that, after the cut frenzy, people will say “never again” and realise that social impact needs to be at the heart of all decisions about public services.

A paradigm shift

Tim Crabbe closed the workshop sharing the learning from the development of Views and calling for a paradigm shift where the researched become the researcher, providers of information become users of information and the subjects of analysis become the beneficiaries of the analysis.

For more information on the Views platform visit www.views.coop

For more information about the learning coming out of Substance’s work on the Views platform you can read the pamphlet “Whose story is it anyway”.

You can read the tweets from the event on #nestaprove