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The Strategic Growth Matrix

19/4/2023

 
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Are you determined to grow as an organisation and do you have a plan to do it?
How do you determine which service areas your organisation should invest in and what your growth targets are? Importantly - How do you balance growth in impact and growth in revenue?

Mission-led organisations need to focus on delivering both revenue (financial sustainability) and social impact (outcomes that matter to clients of our services). But in an environment of finite resources (and potentially diminishing resources) the question is how to assess where these limited resources should go to achieve growth goals and targets.

One way we have helped clients think about their growth is to review each of their programs across two dimensions using our Strategic Growth Matrix©. The purpose of the Strategic Growth Matrix  is to force critical thinking about each of the services and programs the organisation offers and prioritise resources in a way that best achieves the mission of social impact. Sometimes organisations with lots of revenue and staff can feel their goal is simply to grow as an organisation - more money, more staff. But the Strategic Growth Matrix helps make the social impact goals of the organisation more explicitly reflected in strategy, not just the financial sustainability goals.



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Data Collaboration Presentation at VAADA Conference

17/3/2023

 
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In February, Dale presented at the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association (VAADA) conference on how a whole social sector can come together to take leadership of data and develop a collaborative data project to share useful data across multiple stakeholders. Collaborative data projects enable a sector to see the 'whole impact' of the sector and measure outcomes in consistent ways.  See the presentation pack below.
Download Collaborative Data Presentation

5 Ways to empower the frontline with data

16/3/2023

 
​In the social sector the collection of data has traditionally been about compliance with funder requirements. Often staff and clients are collecting lots of data but they don’t get to see or analyse it - it all goes into a central database seen only by the data boffins and not by the people delivering the services or the clients themselves.

At its best, data should be used to help people across an organisation to make better decisions. This is the world of ‘business intelligence’ not long term program evaluations and focuses on practical, timely and useful data. At the frontline it can be powerful to have data and visualisations that help a case worker or intake worker to better understand needs in context, and to plan services or manage waitlists, among other things.
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​5 things you can do to better empower frontline workers in your organisation:

  1. Conference with staff about their needs and frustrations - good data system design requires a clear view of how data will be used at the end of the process. Get buy-in by trimming the number of metrics collected to just what’s useful, and streamline the process of collection. Don’t just rely on the quality managers or ‘experts’ - find out what staff need at their fingertips.
  2. Provide live dashboards that focus on relevant client visualisations - at intake, teams need live data (even if it was entered only moments ago into a system) that brings various threads together in single charts and dashboards. Enable filters down to service groups or individual clients, and allow for multiple clients or groups to be visualised.

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6 things to consider before you buy a Client Management System

13/12/2022

 
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A CMS or Client Management System (also called a CRM or Client Relationship Management system or Case Management System) are key tools for delivering and improving social services. They are also big business, and can be quite costly to invest in. We know social organisations that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and for larger organisations, millions of dollars on these IT database systems. They are significant investments for cash-strapped social organisations. Yet they don’t always deliver good value.

We advise clients not to rush into buying a CMS, but to first spend time designing your data ecosystem. The key to getting the most out of your IT providers is to develop a detailed, mapped set of metrics and to be clear how you will use this data for better decision making. This forms part of your functional brief to the CMS provider, but it also reduces duplication and the need to re-work your system when you need to make changes down the track.

Here are our top six principles to consider before investing in a new CMS: 

1. Start with the end in mind

We run what we call ‘End State’ workshops that help organisations get laser-focused on the social mission and organisational goals. As you identify what your organisation is trying to achieve, the workshop helps you identify the data you’ll need to achieve your key goals. This then enables you to decide what outputs (reports, IT dashboards) you need to generate these metrics. The End State process is an acquired skill because you have to balance frontline and client needs, quality of data, validated metrics as well and organisational and operational considerations.

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Collaborative Data for COMMUNITY COLLEGES

6/4/2022

 
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Community Colleges are important providers of education and job pathways for people with various barriers to learning and employment. They sit at the intersection of adult education and social impact, and government funders are increasingly looking to explore outcomes-based funding in this sector.

Latitude Network is working with the peak body Community Colleges Australia and five community colleges to run a collaborative data project with the NSW Department of Education. The aim is to develop a common set of data collection standards across multiple colleges to allow comparative data on outcomes and performance.

This is an exciting project that demonstrates how data systems, continuous improvement and innovation processes can be applied at a systems level in social and education sectors. The project is designing a system that works for multiple different organisations using different student management systems (databases), in a range of different geographies serving a wide range of student needs. The de-identified data can then be collated across multiple organisations in a consistent way to create dashboards and analysis covering different programs, locations, services and outcomes.

In the next phase Latitude Network will build common dashboards and conduct periodic ‘deep dives’, or data analytics reports, to generate insights that enable colleges to improve (optimise) services and social impact. Comparative data is very powerful because it allows individual colleges to anonymously see their performance in the context of the performance of other organisations delivering in different regions. This provides evidence to flag performance gaps and to learn from best practices with objective data (not just those who claim to have good practice). 

This work is important for peak bodies to consider as a tool to improve system performance in any sector or sub-sector of the social services system. Watch this space for more information as the project moves to implementation. Feel free to reach out to us about lessons from this project if you are seeking to improve performance in multi-stakeholder or cross-organisation collaborations.

Move the dial - youth activation

27/3/2022

 
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​Latitude Network are thrilled to announce that we will be working with Reclink Australia and Vichealth on a unique outcomes challenge: to get 100,000 young Victorians to be more physically active and socially connected. In doing so, this project will tap into 160 different underutilised sites across Victoria to transform them into physical activity spaces for young people. 

Funded by VicHealth and supported by a host of youth organisations and agencies, the project will be genuinely co-design and produced by young people, using open innovation thinking to ensure that physical activities and environments meet the needs and preferences of the young people who will use them. 

Latitude Network will bring its expertise in open innovation and data-driven performance management to ensure that this project generates lasting, measurable outcomes for young Victorians, whilst building capability in Reclink (and partners) in its approach to data, program design, segmentation, outcomes and impact measurement. 

More on the project here.
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  • About
    • Our Team
    • Vision
  • Services
    • Data Analytics >
      • Research
      • Data Analytics
      • Service Design
      • Operations Systems
      • High Performance
    • Outcomes Collaborations
    • Outcomes Funding Advisory >
      • Social impact bonds
      • Outcomes-based Infrastructure
  • Cases
    • Toward Home Case Study
    • Wellways Case Study
    • Hello Sunday Morning Case Study
    • Cricket Victoria Case Study
    • Sacred Heart Mission Case Study
  • Insights
    • Lunch & Learn
  • Contact