Between October 2020 and June 2021, members of the BTSE team participated in the first Datawise London Cohort.
The Cohort is a programme to improve data management capacity in third sector organisations as part of the wider Datawise programme led by Superhighways a charity that supports IT development in the third sector.
Once a month, we attended fun and intensive full day workshops alongside seven other charities as well as receiving one to one mentoring, support and accessing free bitesize training sessions on impact and advanced Excel skills. The structure comprised a learning framework which responded to an initial data maturity assessment we completed and the aims and objectives we had for taking part in the programme.
Specifically, BTSE wanted to explore how we can better use the data we have available, eg. through the service delivery of the Bromley Well contract and external datasets, to understand how we can improve services, plan for the future health and wellbeing needs of residents in the borough of Bromley, and develop a bespoke evaluation framework to support impact reporting.
As the programme draws to a close, we can already see evidence of the benefits of taking part. We have made considerable improvements to our database and data collection processes, run a workshop on data culture for front line staff, started to develop a hypothesis of change that will sit above service level theories of change and made use of external data sets such as the London Data store, to inform decision making and interrogate borough level demographic and health inequality information.
Next steps
The next steps for us will be to enhance our reporting with improved visualisations of data, refine client outcome reporting for Bromley Well and continue to shape an evaluation framework that considers the social and economic return on investment.
