Clear Impact Senior Consultant, Karen Finn, has extensive experience in using Results-Based Accountability™ particularly in the areas of children, youth and family policy. Finn is currently using her expertise and passion for improving the lives of children and families through a focus on developing performance measures for a large state child welfare system to improve the impact of programs and services provided to children and families. Finn reflects on her experience of creating organization-wide performance measures with the input of hundreds of child welfare system staff.
We all probably use the 5-Step Process recommended by Mark Friedman in Trying Hard is Not Good Enough to select headline performance measures. But how do you use this process when you are seeking the input of over 1000 people? I am currently working to solve this problem. I am working with a large state child welfare system that is using RBA to develop performance measures for services such as Family Support, Intensive Family Preservation and Foster Care. This state is really doing this the right way by getting input from all levels of staff within the system, including contractual providers of services. This could have been a nightmare, but to make this practical, I used a “bracket system” and a webinar polling process.
Similar to the NCAA March Madness, we started off with hundreds of possible performance measures. The East Bracket was from the State staff. The West Bracket was from the Providers. The first round occurred during RBA trainings where participants used the Friedman 5-step process in small groups to brainstorm potential performance measures for a particular child welfare service. The second round involved these same small workgroups prioritizing the “headline performance measures” according to each measure’s communication power, program representational power and data power. I collected the headline measures from all of these workgroups from 19 separate trainings and summarized them into one document. The third round and fourth rounds involved using the webinar polling process. Providers and state staff were invited to participate in webinars to review the proposed performance measures, lobby for the performance measures that they thought were the most powerful and then vote using the webinar polling process for the most powerful performance measures.
The semi-final round is occurring this week with a smaller RBA workgroup who will review all the final list of headline performance measures and make final votes using the webinar polling process. These final recommendations will go to a Senior Leadership Team that will decide the performance measures to request in contracts with providers.
Most importantly, the providers will use the Clear Impact Scorecard to report on these headline performance measures to the State and to continuously “turn the curve” to improve services and impact for children and families.
