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By Matthew Schulz, journalist, SmartyGrants
This year’s social impact high achievers come from a family dispute resolution service, a foundation for rural and regional areas, a data-based collaboration that’s helped community college students, and a Salvos family violence project.
The annual Social Impact Measurement Network Australia (SIMNA) awards – now in their tenth year – continue to be hotly contested.
All the winners have plenty of evidence to show that their efforts are making a difference, and they are:
“Relationships Australia should be congratulated for their highly strategic, rigorous and evidenced approach to social impact measurement.”
The SIMNA judges agreed that Relationships Australia Victoria (RAV) set the standard for introducing social impact measurement across its activities, culminating in its high-quality Social Impact Report for 2024, which provided both detailed analyses and case studies.
The prestigious award for excellence recognised RAV’s ability to collate and assess quality data for a wide range of its services. It was able to pull together data, research and practice evidence to demonstrate a cost-benefit analysis of its services and produce a “wellbeing valuation”. The analysis demonstrated that the service was cost effective and improved outcomes for users.
The RAV, which has been providing family dispute resolution services for 75 years, has been honing its social impact capabilities over several years, drawing on a combination of program logic, organisational theory of change and an outcome measurement framework.
The judges found that the RAV’s social impact measurement “demonstrates excellence across all criteria”.
“Relationships Australia should be congratulated for their highly strategic, rigorous and evidenced approach to social impact measurement.”
The Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR) won the award for “social impact measurement in funding, investment and grantmaking”.
FRRR is known for distributing small grants, providing more than $22.5 million to nearly 1000 organisations in 550 communities in the past year.
But it is the Investing in Rural Community Futures (IRCF) project that has been recognised for its impact measurement process and guiding the way for future programs.
The IRCF is a multi-million-dollar effort to help not-for-profits work better in selected regional local government areas.
To date, it has focused on Leeton, Junee, the Nambucca Valley, Ulladulla, Batemans Bay, Nowra, Bay & Basin, Shoalhaven and the Bega Valley in NSW. The program is now rolling out in Victoria, with Colac, Hamilton, Maryborough, Portland and Swan Hill picked for assistance.
The premise of the IRCF program is that towns depend on their not-for-profits to thrive, and that “local leaders are best placed to know what is going to make the biggest difference in their community”.
The program offers a “toolbox” of support which includes a facilitator, grants, planning processes, skill development, and support and encouragement for community-led initiatives.
Evaluation is at the heart of the project, and it tracks the effect of the program on NFPs and the communities they serve.
The award recognised the five-year, $5 million pilot effort, which was carefully documented in FRRR’s September 2024 impact study.
FRRR used an “action research” approach for the IRCF program, tallying the effect on people, strategy, efficiencies and systems across organisations. Measurements accounted for the limited time of NFP staff and volunteers and sought to be accessible, capture wider impacts, and include capacity-building help for participants. The studies involved self-assessment surveys, face-to-face meetings, workshops, a stakeholder breakfast and regular meetings with facilitators.
FRRR chief executive Natalie Egleton said the focus on strengthening organisations fitted the goal of helping groups “fit their oxygen masks first” to enable them to better help their client communities.
The judges said the project featured a “strong learning orientation”, which helped build the impact measurement framework, but it was flexible enough to change in response to what evaluators learned during the pilot.
Read more about the Investing in Rural Community Futures (IRCF) program
A joint effort between a data and social impact consultancy and a network of community educators is demonstrating the power of cooperation.
The Latitude Network, which specialises in helping social services organisations, won the collaboration award alongside 11 Adult and Community Education (ACE) providers across 27 NSW colleges.
Between them, the two organisations have created tools to help the ACE providers better understand their data so they can improve the way they teach.
Community colleges cater for students shut out of mainstream education, migrants, people with disabilities, disadvantaged students, mature-age learners, early school leavers, job seekers, CALD groups, and women returning to the workforce.
The ACE data collaboration project draws on data from 42,000 of these students across 100 data fields. The system allows ACE providers to track demographics, personal needs, academic results, and the employment outcomes of students, and to compare the performance of different colleges.
In future, the project aims to use machine learning to provide more detailed social impact reports, to set sector benchmarks, and to generate “big data” analysis of good student results and satisfaction levels.
Community Colleges Australia policy and project manager Evelyn Goodwin said in a recent blog post, “The ability to see meaningful patterns and insights from shared data is a game changer for our colleges.”
Judges described the winner as “fantastic work”, saying the application showed “genuine engagement across a large group of collaborating stakeholders”. They noted the capacity-building component of the system as a strength and said it had enabled colleges to make data-driven decisions and share social impact measurement metrics.
The Salvation Army was rewarded for its efforts in sensitively measuring its work with diverse victim-survivors of family violence.
The Family Violence Carinya Therapeutic Program, in partnership with Women Illawarra, provided survivors with timely help to access therapy, addressing long delays in waiting lists for services in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven districts in NSW.
In their careful experiment, evaluators took a co-design approach, to respect the trauma of participants and their children, and to account for the experience of diverse participants, including Indigenous women.
Evaluators sough to “decolonise” the evaluation by balancing measurement rigour with the principles of inclusion, social justice, collaboration, cultural safety and lived experience.
According to judges, the result was a “skilfully accomplished” evaluation process that employed a “transformative” and “trauma-informed” approach and was innovative in concept and method. They praised the use of language that resulted in “tailored and reflexive outcomes” instead of “top-down” language, all while maintaining a “methodological rigour”.
“It is a testament to the value of flexible measurement that respects and integrates beneficiary perspectives,” judges said.
The organisation’s research and outcomes measurement team last year rolled out a sophisticated suite of assessments under its Stronger Communities Outcomes Measurement project, which is aligned to the Salvation Army’s mission to “share the love of Jesus”.
The Salvation Army was recognised as the 2023 runner-up in the overall excellence category for its measurement framework.
SIMNA co-chair Sarah Barker said the awards, now in their 10th year, showed the rapid evolution of the sector.
“These winners truly deserve these accolades and allow us to showcase inspiring examples of best practice. These awards are a fantastic opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the incredible work being done across Australia to demonstrate social impact.”
The latest crop of awards revealed a “growing sophistication in how organisations are approaching impact measurement”, as the kinds of organisations involved in social measurement broadened each year.
Barker said the awards and other SIMNA events and networking “aim to spark conversations that continue throughout the year”.
Among the judges was SmartyGrants team member Fiona Waugh, who helps grantmakers develop more effective and efficient programs – including social measurement. Waugh judged in the innovation and excellence categories, and said it was not an easy task.
“Assessing these outstanding applicants showed me the extraordinary efforts practitioners are making to ensure social impact measurement is the cornerstone of their programs.”
She praised social impact measurement practitioners’ willingness to share their skills, knowledge, data-collection methods and technology with their peers.
All about the SIMNA 2024 awards including more winners and finalists