Last month I had the great pleasure of spending a week in the USA to see for myself how GtD is developing its services in Atlanta, before attending the 9th annual Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Americans and the British may be “divided by a common language”, but I was struck by the common challenges that policy makers and practitioners face on both sides of the Atlantic: ensuring that practice is grounded in “what works?”, getting more “bang for your buck” in service delivery and managing “big data” to understand how policy makers and practitioners are responding to complex social problems. Whether they are based in the U.S. or the U.K., all of us at GtD feel privileged to help our clients to meet these challenges by providing definitive social impact analytics that are helping them to monitor their activities; learn quickly how to improve them; and, ultimately to prove their effectiveness – definitively.
It was the theme of “big data” that took Alan and I to Rutgers University where we were delighted to contribute our thoughts and experiences of “managing the data glut” at the PPMR conference. Drawing on over 20 years of experience of research and evaluation in the criminal justice system, we used our work in the development of the DASHBOARD for the CJS as an example of how to manage the data glut. It provided a clear, illustrative example of how we rationalised over 1,500 separate performance indicators to provide a highly visual and user-friendly dashboard of data that provides managers across the criminal justice system a single version of their performance in bringing offenders to justice.
The presentation we gave at the conference is available to view on our LinkedIn page, please do follow us for updates and information relating to social impact analytics.
Contact my colleague Alan or myself if you would like more information about any of our projects or how our social impact analytics could benefit your organisation. If you believe you are ready to embark on your own social impact journey, you might be interested in our free Strategic Impact Assessment. Please do get in touch if we can be of assistance by emailing us at:
Jack Cattell jack.cattell@getthedata.net
Alan Mackie alan.mackie@gethedata.co.uk