Performance improvement has been the subject of much attention in the social change arena. Governments, funders and service users are all keen to know what difference an agency’s services make to achieving social goals. There are so many approaches to assessing quality, performance and impact these days. We provide services in both reviews and evaluations and quality management systems.

1. Reviews & evaluations

Frequently clients commission external reviews as a one-off event, possibly due to a concern, or as a routine, such as government departments’ five-yearly reviews of a Non-Departmental Public Body’s (NDPB) financial and management performance. We have carried out many such organisational reviews from the small charity to the large NDPB. While a good review has to meet the needs of the funder of the service, it should also address the concerns of managers and board members and, in so doing, bring benefit for all parties.

Clients approach us to:

• Carry out external reviews of the organisation or a particular service, often for a major funder
• Carry out an external ‘audit’ of performance for a funder or for internal use
• Benchmark their performance against other organisations

2. Quality management

Managers in the social change arena are interested in quality not just because they are keen to respond to an external pressure. Good managers want to learn about what works, do more of it and eliminate unnecessary activities or waste.

All well and good, but there is a bewildering array of quality management tools to aid organisational learning and to improve performance. And today’s fad can soon become tomorrow’s tired and discarded experiment. (Remember TQM?) The list below gives just a hint of the range of approaches available. All are current and valid. Each has its benefits and weaknesses.

• Recognised quality systems, such as EQSM, social auditing, PQASSO, etc
• Quality standards
• Regulatory standards
• Peer review
• Benchmarking
• National occupational standards
• Sub-sector performance indicators
• Evaluation research
• Outcomes focussed approaches
• Capacity building
• External organisational or service reviews
• Other tools, such as the Balanced Scorecard

We recognise that all organisations committed to social change will want to:

• Strive for continuous improvement
• Use an appropriate performance improvement tool as a means and not an end in itself
• Meet the expectation that stakeholders have of them
• Be committed to meet agreed service levels and quality standards first time and every time
• Learn from how they do things as well as what they do…
• …including ensuring that diversity and equality questions are at the forefront of their performance and quality agendas

So, a good strategic consultancy intervention in this area will want to help you define what it is you need to know and which audiences you need to satisfy. And then choose with you an appropriate methodology, whether a recognised system or approach or develop something that is individual to you but follows recognised principles of performance management.

Clients approach us to:

• Choose a quality or performance management system
• Improve their use of their existing approaches to monitoring performance and/or impact
• Carry out surveys of members and/or external stakeholders
• Assess whether social auditing will be right