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. 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. When should you engage external, critical thinking in responding to a tender and when can you manage it in-house? We think you should answer two key questions to determine this:
Complexity and noveltyWhere funders are looking for the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver well-established services, you need a sharp focus on your operating model and being able to scale and/or replicate that with fidelity and at lowest cost. You will have a clear understanding of the costs to deliver and a target margin. In short, you need to deliver maximum services.
Strategic tender support is not likely to be a good investment in this case. Where tenders are looking for novel approaches (for example, a collective or ‘alliancing’ approach to governance), or where there is added complexity (for example, where a sizeable proportion of the funding can be distributed flexibly) you really do need to think more deeply, strategically and innovatively about how you will respond. The traditional approach won’t maximise your chances in this case Article first published on Pro Bono News 22 September 2021. With the move to reporting on outcomes gaining pace, Dale Renner, director of Latitude Network, shares advice on what social organisations can do to build an outcomes-focused organisation. Have you noticed that more and more philanthropic and government funders are asking for proposals to have an “outcomes focus”? Impact investors and service commissioners increasingly want evidence that a program makes a difference.
The move to report on “outcomes” is gathering momentum and for good reason. The purpose of social sector funding, whether in homelessness, mental health or child protection, is to improve the lives of people – to make a difference. That’s also the mission of every social sector organisation. An outcome is a way of defining and measuring this important “difference” made in someone’s life – between dropping out of school and finishing school, between being employed or not employed, between mental distress and a sense of wellbeing. By defining and measuring the right outcomes, organisations and funders can focus efforts on what matters most to the service recipient, and therefore make the most social impact. |
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