Topping the not-for-profit category of the Impact Measurement Awards, Anglicare WA has been building a culture of evaluation and continuous improvement across the organization for the past two and a half years. Driven by its strategic plan and single Beneficiary Performance Indicator (BPI) of moving clients from surviving to thriving, this choice is centered on a strong desire to know and have evidence of the impact its services have.

A four phase implementation strategy has been followed in introducing services to Results Based Accountability (RBA) and starting them on defining, collecting and reviewing client outcomes data. Today, 87 percent of Anglicare WA’s 68 services have begun the RBA process by identifying their outcomes and approximately 40 percent have been collecting outcomes data for more than a year.

Researching and reviewing best practices and finding the well-documented benefits of creating an organizational culture of evaluation, Anglicare WA applied for and won a Social Innovations Grant from the Department of Communities. This award allowed two years of employment for a fulltime evaluation manager to oversee the implementation of RBA internally and across the 68 services and to share lessons with the sector. Starting with those services who volunteered for the training, one‐by‐one, services completed workshops with the evaluation manager to define their outcomes and begin setting up systems to allow for data collection and analysis.

Roadblocks appeared immediately, mainly stemming from the lack of outcomes measurement within the organization. Most of Anglicare WA’s services were found to only be reporting on outputs, as required by funders. Another huge barrier to seamless implementation was not having one overarching database with the capacity to capture and analyze the outcome data that would be needed. Having identified these issues and still needing to advance the initiative, solutions for data storage had to be tackled immediately.

Staff approval and buy‐in was identified from the outset as imperative to success. Starting with the service staff has had huge benefits for both acceptance of measurement and use of results. Allowing staff to define their own outcomes for their services increased their sense of ownership in the process and their accountability for client outcome results.

Early successes were seen when services began reflecting on their practices and making changes as a result of analyzing RBA data. To make data presentation meaningful and less overwhelming, services focus on three to five outcomes at a time, ensuring the most important indicators of success are constantly being monitored, staff members aren’t drowning in data, and all results can be displayed in a user‐friendly, one‐page report. It was also found that presenting services with their own data in this one‐page “headline measure” report resulted in abundant gains in staff understanding and buy‐in.

An all‐staff survey completed four times from December of 2011 to March of 2013, shows encouraging results, with the staff members reporting they understand what RBA is increasing from 53.6 percent to 80.9 percent and 66.1 percent of staff in 2013 agreeing that implementing RBA within Anglicare WA is a good thing.

Moving forward, Anglicare WA will continue to monitor and work on improving understanding and support of RBA as a tool to measure client outcomes. Recent steps taken to make data and measurement more “fun” include highlighting a service’s “curve of the month” on the intranet and staff newsletter, as well as posting relevant cartoons on bulletin boards to make data more relatable, fun and familiar.

Anglicare WA’s road to building a culture of evaluation has been long and fraught with learnings but has already led to improvements for clients.  As of today, 87 percent of Anglicare WA’s services have begun their RBA process by identifying their outcomes and approximately 40 percent have been collecting outcomes data for more than a year. The evaluation project manager has also been able to work with more than 20 external organizations, independent consultants and government agencies to help them learn and implement RBA within their own areas of service.

More information and examples of work being done by Anglicare WA in this area can be found on their RBA page and RBA blog.