You know the iconic image of Florence Nightingale, the British nurse, wandering through the night with a lamp to tend to the dying soldiers of the Crimean war. She is responsible for saving tens of thousands of lives - but not from providing one-to-one nursing care. Her broadest impact came from - wait for it - being a data analyst. Her work led to a long lasting legacy in healthcare to value data as a way to make better decisions and get better outcomes. Her biggest impact came not from nursing but - wait for it - from data analysis
It might come as a surprise (shock) that not everybody loves or understands data. Sometimes to get executives engaged with your data project, you have to help them care at least a bit about data. When pitching the Data Impact Journey to decision makers, you can share the benefits you can expect to get out of such a project. These include - 1. Improved Decision Making: Data-driven decisions are often more accurate and reliable than those based on intuition or anecdotal evidence. Investing in data skills and systems can provide the necessary tools and knowledge to make informed decisions. 2. Enhanced Service Delivery: Understanding the needs and preferences of your beneficiaries through data can help tailor your services more effectively, leading to improved outcomes and increased beneficiary satisfaction. The team at Latitude Network is starting the year with a new more focused mission - 'Building a data-empowered social sector.' Why? Because we’ve learned over the last seven years of work with many great and varied organisations that data is a key to how we achieve better social impact. Most social organisations also recognise that they are at the early stages of their data journey, with plenty of opportunity to improve and grow. You can read more about what data empowerment looks like in this article or in our updated website. Is your board focusing more on compliance than impact? Is it engaged or disengaged with critical organisational matters? What questions does it ask of its executive team and what evidence does it require in dealing with the response? Is the board using data to make impact-led decisions? Quite rightly, much has been written and spoken about our compliance duties as board members in recent years. And we still have a way to go yet to give ourselves, and our stakeholders, comfort that we have appropriate systems and processes in place to manage data safety and security. But what about your board’s key function - to deliver on the organisation’s mission? In our experience, most board’s are not using good, reliable data to make impact-driven decisions. We're thrilled to announce that we are a part of a consortium that is taking a unique, solution-focused approach to understanding and solving for the growing challenge of women's homelessness. The group, consisting of Housing Choices Australia, Sefa and Latitude Network has been funded by Lord Mayors' Charitable Foundation to explore how a cohort-focused, outcomes-based approach to the growing challenge of older women's homelessness can create a set of solutions that might address particular elements of this challenge. The team is drawing on insights from experts in the field as well as directly from women with lived experience. We are focusing on the people who may be vulnerable to entering into homelessness due to life and financial circumstances, and seeking to avoid early entry to aged care. Further outputs from the project will be made available over the course or 2024. What is the lowdown on last week's $677M investment in outcomes and early intervention?
Last week's State Budget gives us yet more evidence that the journey to outcomes-based funding is speeding up. While the Feds will build an outcomes-contracting fund (the Outcomes Fund) the Victorian Government is using its Early Intervention Investment Framework (EIIF). Both the Outcomes Fund and the EIIF do the same thing - allocate funding to programs that pre-determine their performance targets. The point is to direct funding to those practices that show measurable, real impacts and that, as a result, lower the use of acute social and health services. In both cases, measuring 'avoided costs' will be critical. Avoided costs are State Government service costs saved from a successful service intervention (or, Avoidable Costs minus services delivered = Avoided Costs). This is the high-bar for impact measurement as far as Governments are concerned. What does this mean for you and your program? Are you 'Avoided-Cost' ready? Reach out to us if you'd like to talk about the implications of this shift. Read more for the full list of EIIF funding programs. |
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February 2024
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