June 9th, 2015
By: Maya Romic, former Business Development Consultant, Clear Impact Australia
Over the last few months, Lutheran Community Care QLD has been implementing Results Based Accountability™ (RBA) in more than 20 disability, mental health, and youth programs.
Lutheran Community Care (LCC) is a Queensland-based provider of aged care, family services, disability services, and hospital chaplaincy. They operate 25 services across urban and regional Queensland. Clear Impact Australia’s Capacity Building Consultant, Maya Romic, has worked closely with Richard Fahy, Director of Business Partnerships at LLC, in supporting LCC managers and team leaders to understand the RBA framework, develop meaningful performance measures, and implement the Clear Impact Scorecard.
The state of Queensland is currently going through a process where many government departments are reforming their contracts to reflect an outcomes-focused approach. Lutheran Community Care has taken the initiative and has chosen RBA as their preferred method, to prepare them for the changing contractual relationship with some of their funders. Richard explained why: “Lutheran Community Care was presented [with the] Results Based Accountability Framework in 2014 and immediately saw the benefit of cutting through to the heart of ensuring programs [are] delivering meaningful data. Our clients are the centre of our mission, and ensuring that we can demonstrate that we are making a difference in their lives requires a sophisticated platform with a simple way of defining the outcomes and goals.”
One key contribution to LCC’s successful implementation of RBA is the buy-in that they have from different levels of the organisation. Managers and their team leaders were trained in the framework, and were the ones involved in developing performance measures. This has allowed them to develop a sense of ownership of the data needed to know if anyone is better off as a result of LCC’s different programs. Following this process, Clear Impact Australia also ran an RBA workshop with the LCC CEO and their Board. “RBA has been embraced as a useful tool from the CEO to our program support levels,” Richard explained.
LCC also made the decision to use Clear Impact Scorecard software to support the successful implementation of RBA. The LCC Scorecard has been designed to capture data on both a program and organisational level. The top-level performance measures reflect LCC’s Strategic Plan; with programs capturing data on 5 shared measures that feed into this strategic Scorecard. Each program has program-specific measures too, to reflect the outcomes intended for clients who access them. Richard explained that the Clear Impact Scorecard “has allowed the organization to deposit data in a well-structured manner, aligned with end-of-month reporting. As the data aggregates, we are able to trend performance at a strategic and program level with meaning.
Lutheran Community Care has partnered with Clear Impact Australia in hosting a Forum in Brisbane this July to share implementation tips with other organisations interested in measuring outcomes. Clear Impact Australia are excited to see another organisation committed to measuring and achieving outcomes, and will continue to support Richard and his teams with their RBA practice.
