Measuring what matters

ESS is working in partnership with the Scottish Community Safety Network (SCSN) to develop a way to evaluate the activities community safety practitioners deliver to prevent unintentional injury.

What ESS is doing

ESS has been working with community safety practitioners such as fire service and local authority home safety officers and falls prevention workers. These identified a need for a tool to help them evaluate their activities to prevent unintentional injury. In response to this, ESS and SCSN developed ‘Measuring what matters’, a practical guide to help practitioners evaluate the impact of their day to day work. During early 2019 ESS and SCSN had three sessions with a range of practitioners working directly with people and communities at the local level to tackle unintentional harm. With this group we co-created a resource which includes a logic model, outcomes and indicator bank. It is currently in a draft version for testing.

Measuring what matters framework

‘Measuring what matters: An evaluation framework to support practitioners delivering activities to prevent unintentional harm or injury’ helps to shift the balance from measuring only what can be counted (such as number of people, number of events) to measuring what matters in order to focus on outcomes for people. 

This resource will be useful for practitioners who are asking themselves these kinds of questions:

• What kind of things could I measure to show the difference I am making in preventing unintentional harm? 
• I deliver talks on home safety and count the number of people I’ve reached… but I can’t show that they are safer as a result
• I’m asked to report back on national targets but that doesn’t show the full picture of what we achieve. 

By using this framework practitioners will:

• Be better able to show the impact of their work on people and communities
• Over time, have a better understanding about “what works” in delivering preventative activities and be able to share this with others to promote learning.

Download the framework through the link below:

Watch this 10-minute webinar that explains how to use the Measuring What Matters Framework tool in your work:

What next?

We have moved into stage 2, which involves supporting a group of practitioners to test out the framework in their work and gather feedback on their experiences of using it. We have recruited a range of community safety practitioners to support them to apply it to their work. We plan to share their learning with you later this year.

Those involved are:

1. Fife CAREs
2. NHS Highland older people falls prevention
3. Safer North Ayrshire partnership
4. Perth and Kinross Home Safety Partnership
5. The Risk Factory, Edinburgh
6. Port Glasgow new parents’ initiative
7. ROSPA
8. South Lanarkshire unintentional injuries group
9. SFRS Dumfries road safety for young drivers
10. Wheatley Group fire and home safety services
11. Staying Active, Red Cross volunteers

Below are related resources to the Measuring what Matters framework:

Are you measuring what matters? –  guest blog by ESS Evaluation Support Manager Nicola Swan published on the Safer Communities Safety Network website about how the framework was developed

Please feel free to use the resource and give us feedback too by emailing Nicola or tweet @EvalSupScot #Measurewhatmatters