Charity creates ‘first ever’ monthly impact reporting dashboard

10 Nov 2017 News

A view of the Street League dashboard

Sport for employment charity Street League has launched an online dashboard to provide monthly impact reporting, which it says is the first of its kind.

The charity’s online impact dashboard will enable users to access anonymised data about the young people it is supporting, find out about the barriers they have overcome and which employment sectors they have moved into.

Whilst other impact dashboards exist, the charity believes that its integration of monthly-updated data is a first for the sector.

The data, updated on the 7th of each month, is pulled directly from the charity’s participant CRM database, provided by Hanlon Software Solutions. By April, the plan is for this to be updated weekly.

Street League’s staff input data about where their beneficiaries come from, their journey through the programme and whether they stayed in a job for more than six months at the end of it.

The charity also tracks when it has not been able to assist a young person, such as when they leave its course early, and then uses this data to redesign its programmes.

All the data goes through an internal audit that requires every outcome to be validated – for example, a job outcome is only valid once the charity has a photocopy of a first month’s payslip or a job offer letter.

The dashboard is part of the charity’s #CallForClarity campaign, backed by 147 other organisations, which recommends that charities should never over-claim what they do; that all percentages should be backed up by full data sets and that all outcomes should be supported by auditable evidence.

Street League chief executive Matt Stevenson-Dodd said: "We don’t think success should be measured by turnover, or by vague numbers of people reached, or by a story about one or two beneficiaries.

“It should be measured by presenting what we do in a transparent way and allowing other people to decide whether they think we are successful, or not."

On 15 November, Stevenson-Dodd will help to lead a round-table discussion in London on the same subject of accountability and transparency with 25 chief executives from the charity and youth sector.

His goal is to create a set of unified industry principles for impact measurement which all charities could sign up to.

 

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