Beyond the Dashboard: understanding the reach and impact of Gloucestershire’s VCSE sector.

In her first blog post, Karen Matthews, Business Director at Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance and the brains behind the Sector Intelligence Dashboard, shares her thoughts on the challenges encountered in trying to understand Gloucestershire’s VCSE sector, and what we need to consider when collecting data from organisations.

Building Gloucestershire’s Sector Intelligence Dashboard has been a real journey of discovery about the diversity and sheer scale of the sector, and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg! We’ve been left wondering - how do we truly capture the size, reach and impact of the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector?

There is lots of information available. The Dashboard pulls from charity accounts, company records, and website information, and our members’ annual returns and surveys all tell us something really valuable. Bringing sources together has revealed interesting trends and some truly fascinating facts, and has given us at the Alliance an indication of where our attention and resources need to be focused.

However, it’s also become very clear how careful we need to be when using data to draw conclusions that can have real consequences for communities. Every decision about what we count, how we classify it, and what we leave out affects the conclusions we make.

The Dashboard is only the beginning

Before we can describe the sector, we have to decide which organisations are included.

Registered charities were the obvious starting point - they offer a substantial quantity of readily available data. However, charities are part of a sector that also includes community interest companies (CICs), other social enterprises, faith organisations and informal groups. Some organisations have multiple records (charitable companies, for example), while others probably do highly valued work in our communities without appearing on any registers at all.

Combining multiple sources helps us fill in more of this picture, but it also creates challenges: matching records, removing duplicates, identifying organisations that have closed or merged was a big part of the work for the Dashboard, and it’s a constantly evolving picture.

This work is not at all exciting, but it’s important.

A registered office address isn’t the whole story

One of the biggest problems we have is understanding and showing where organisations actually reach.

A registered office tells us where the post is delivered, and might also be the location of some service delivery. In most cases, it’s just part of an organisation’s whole story, and tells us very little about what they do and who they reach.

An organisation based in one district might serve the whole county. Another might concentrate on a few streets. Online support may cross geographical boundaries altogether. To understand reach, we need to distinguish between an organisation’s base, its intended service area and the communities it actually reaches. These are different pieces of information, and each answers a different question.

Without that distinction, a map of organisations can easily be mistaken for a map of access to support.

Missing data isn’t the same as zero

Working with the Dashboard has also reinforced the importance of treating gaps honestly.

An unknown income figure for an organisation is not the same as no income. Employee numbers are really troublesome because few records show them, and headcount isn’t the same as Full Time Equivalent (FTE).

Comparisons need to recognise these differences and the constantly-evolving nature of these figures.

It was decided early on that the Dashboard should help people understand the evidence behind a finding: how recent it is, how much of the sector it covers and where information remains incomplete. Making these data gaps visible increases the usefulness of the information.

Reach and impact need something different

Even a perfect dataset won’t tell us everything we want to know.

Income, staffing and organisational age provide context. Even where activity data is available, it tells us only about what has been delivered. Neither, on its own, tells us what changed as a result, what might have worked better and whether resources could have been used to better effect.

Answering these questions requires evidence from organisations and communities themselves. That might include changes in confidence, access to support, or service users’ own accounts of what mattered to them.

We also need to be careful when bringing data together - protecting individuals’ anonymity is vital. We also need to understand what is being counted. The same person may receive support from several organisations, so adding beneficiary totals together does not necessarily tell us the real story.

We need to make the data worthy of the effort involved

We know ourselves how tempting it is to try to plug every data gap with a survey. However, VCSE organisations already face data requests from funders, commissioners, regulators and infrastructure bodies. Asking for more information is useful only if the purpose is clear and the effort proportionate.

We’re living in an exciting time for data. Technology allows us to share, clean or analyse it at a scale and speed never previously possible, and understandably there’s a lot of interest in the power it holds to help us understand what works, why it works, and where it works. This could make a huge difference to our communities.

However, organisations should also receive something useful in return - we’re asking for their data, their effort, their stories. They need to be given a seat at the table to design the systems and processes for collecting and sharing data. They also deserve access to the insights gathered that they can use in their planning and funding applications.

Communities also need a role in deciding what counts as useful evidence, too. Measures such as the Indices of Deprivation provide valuable context, but they cannot fully describe a neighbourhood’s strengths, experiences or aspirations. Understanding those requires listening to the people who live there.

Collaboration and trust will be key

Listening to different opinions about how data could be collected, stored and shared is really important. It’s also key that conversations aren’t dominated by larger organisations, and that smaller and informal groups, including those that have little contact with infrastructure organisations or formal funding programmes, are engaged and have a seat at the table.

Trust is a hard nut to crack, but it’s absolutely necessary where data is involved. Taking the time to do things properly, build relationships and consistently model shared values will be part of this work. It won’t be quick, there will be challenges, and it won’t be perfect straightaway. However, we do wholly believe that the potential is absolutely worth it.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or comments about VCSE data systems, we would love to hear from you. You can contact us via info@glosalliance.org.uk, LinkedIn or Facebook, or by calling 01242 858 947.