Impact Services - b-inspired

About

b-inspired is a neighbourhood-based charity operating in the underpriviledged area of Braunstone in Leicester, England. The area faces issues such as: social isolation, health and fitness issues, addictions, low revenues and high unemployment rate, low educational attainment, lack of aspirations, low confidence and self-esteem.

b-inspired aims to be the Community Anchor and champion for Braunstone, able to support their neighbourhood and its citizens to reach full potential by harnessing its strengths and responding to its needs.

Some projects aim at tackling social isolation among elderly people.

Challenges

To support its community, b-inspired delivers projects as diverse as sport-relative projects, support to older people, coaching for young people that have been unemployed for 12 months or more, a foodbank, gardening activities, a local magazine, a carnaval, etc.

Such as many charities in the UK, b-inspired faces the challenge of having to report for each project to a different commissioner, each one having specific reporting requirements. For some projects, b-inspired staff spend a lot of time collecting data for reporting purposes, but did not have a framework allowing them to learn from this data internally, and to use it to inform decision-making. Moreover, b-inspired's management had difficulties communicating on their impact at an organisational level.

Our work

Supporting b-inspired in their journey from impact measurement to impact management

In 2017, Investing for Good had already worked with b-inspired at a strategic level, by organising an Theory of Change workshop.

In the context of the Impact Management Programme, funded by the Access Foundation and Power to Change, Investing for Good had the opportunity to continue this work in 2018/19, and to see how to translate the new Theory of Change into proper data collection and analysis.

We supported b-inspired in the following:

• Defining medium term and long term outcomes at organisational level, and at project level;
• Identifying the conditions for success for each programme (short term outcomes) ;
• Designing a framework to track individual progress and measure results against each outcome. This includes defining the indicators, the assessment method, the data collection processes and the questionnaires ;
• Training the team in impact management and ensuring they feel comfortable with the new data collection tools ;
• Support b-inspired in the transition towards an impact management software, ensuring the compatibility of the tool with the new platform;
• Facilitate the adoption of the framework by the staff through trainings;
• Give recommendations on data analysis and reporting, including dashboards and reports design

b-inspired's feedback:

IFG totally shepherded our organisation through the challenging journey of creating a Theory of Change, translating that into a robust framework and tools, to make impact measurement and management a reality for us…we never ceased to be impressed with their insight and knowledge – not to mention their tenacity to get the project completed.