Delivering Sustainable Outcomes
Given the challenging financial climate, clarity about outcomes and longer-term impacts is key to the most effective targeting of limited resources to support business prosperity and consumer protection. RAND Europe conducted a rigorous investigation of this issue in relation to regulatory services. This involved the creation of an evaluation matrix to assess the impacts of activities and the study of five different areas of work: fair trading, fly-tipping, health and safety, reduction of alcohol harm, and smoking cessation.
A subsequent report, published in October 2009, gave regulatory services a process for building a robust evidence base to clarify and quantify the benefits their activities deliver to local businesses and consumers. The core of this publication was a step by step guide to the development of meaningful indicators to assess the outcomes and impacts of operations, drawing on visual representations called pathways. The use of this toolkit is helping many regulatory services to have more informed discussions about priorities and the allocation of resources, as well as increasing general awareness of their initiatives - enhancing their profile in local strategic partnerships.
The concise version of the toolkit provided below covers all the essentials and includes a worked example from East Cambridgeshire District Council. The 13 key tools it lists are closely linked, and should be applied in sequence to gain their full value, as the elements of a comprehensive evaluation framework.
Outcomes and Impacts Toolkit Summary
Evidence of vital contributions to communities is summarized in dashboards presenting strategic decision-makers with sets of key performance measures. Feedback is shown visually, on a single page divided into four quadrants. An example follows for reference.
Outcomes and Impacts Dashboard Template
To use this resource, please download it to your own computer
The following document outlines approaches to facilitating sessions using the toolkit, based on our experience. It is neither prescriptive nor comprehensive - there are numerous ways of using the toolkit.
