Introduction

Once you have collected information about your work, you will need to interpret and evaluate it. You are trying to answer the questions: How effective are our interventions in achieving what we set out to achieve? How efficient are they? How sustainable and ethical are they? You will also want to examine questions such as: What are the unintended consequences of our interventions? Are our objectives (still) valid? These are also the questions that potential funders will want to know the answers to when they are considering whether or not to allocate money to your centre instead of another project.

Effectiveness

Perhaps the most important question you have to ask yourself about your service is how effective it is in achieving your objectives – in other words, are you making a difference, and is that difference the one which you set out to achieve? Where possible, the best way to measure effectiveness is through outcomes data. So, for example, for our housing advice and referral service in our monitoring example, we wanted to be able to track people’s progress in terms of housing. In terms of evaluating our effectiveness, we would want to look at the outcome indicators – how many people achieved a positive move in terms of accommodation after approaching our service (for the period under review), and how many people either did not achieve more appropriate accommodation or even moved into less appropriate accommodation. A particularly sophisticated monitoring system would even be able to map different types of users (categorised by accommodation status when they first approached the services, for example) against their accommodation progress. This would enable you to detect gaps in your service – for example if you are particularly effective at finding beds for rough sleepers but particularly poor at helping people move on from hostel accommodation.

Once you have collated your outcomes data, you can begin to evaluate your service. If you are being effective, you should have relatively high outcome numbers. The problem is often knowing what can be considered a high success rate – it would be unrealistic to expect to 95% of service users to move into more appropriate accommodation, partly because often the accommodation is simply not available. In order to determine whether your outcomes numbers are high enough, it might help to compare your outcomes data with that of other services in your area and nationally.

It will also be important to consider what other factors are important in helping people to achieve independent living and what progress you are making in these areas. For example, if many of the clients you are working with have considerable substance use issues, progress that they are making in this area will be vital to their attaining independent living but will not be reflected in your housing outcomes. It will then be important to be able to compare information on these clients interactions with substance use interventions and their progress in this area in order to get a full picture of the difference you are making. This also where a soft outcomes monitoring system will be particularly useful in showing that your service is making a difference even if the hard outcomes numbers are relatively low.

Perhaps the most important evaluation data will come from interviewing service users to see how helpful they have found the intervention (see Monitoring / Data Collection tips for more information on interviewing) and what suggestions they have for improvement. Interviews with other services that you interact with, for example the hostels you place people with, could also be very helpful.

Efficiency

It is also important to ensure that you are delivering your service efficiently - especially in a sector where resources are scarce, it is important to avoid waste and to demonstrate to funders that you will make the best possible use of their money. Evaluation of efficiency tends to involve more output data as well as financial information. To evaluate efficiency, you will want to look at the ratios between outputs and outcomes, and resources and outputs, as well as resources and outcomes. Again, it will help to compare this information to similar figures from other organisations, and to ask service users and staff how interventions could be made more efficient.

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