2020 Winners | Older Citizens Advocacy York
Older Citizens Advocacy York
Winner – Improving Impact: Charities with 0-3 paid staff
Who they are
Older Citizens Advocacy York (OCAY) provides support for older people. This support aims to help older people reduce feelings of loneliness and social isolation by helping them to maximise their income, voice concerns about issues affecting them and have information about local services and resources to enable them to make informed decisions about their lives. Based in York, OCAY provides free, confidential and independent services, offering home visits to those who cannot access the office. The service is delivered by volunteers who work with clients for as long as they need support.
What they’ve achieved
In 2016/2017, the OCAY’s trustees realised that they were unable to identify the impact of the charity’s work on clients. This had negative consequences in terms of the organisation’s ability to learn, adapt and refine its strategy, but also to communicate the change it was affecting to external stakeholders (including funders). For the past three years, the board has taken a number of steps to maximise and measure impact, including increasing the effectiveness of the board itself as well as the staff team, recruiting more volunteers to work with clients, and, crucially, improving the monitoring and evaluation of the charity’s work. Trustees were particularly keen to understand how clients felt when they came to OCAY, and what had changed for client’s because of their interaction with OCAY. This led to the development of a pre-case questionnaire, used to set a base line, and a post-case feedback survey. Based on clients’ feedback and case-related data-collection, the board was able to review the organisational strategy and make informed decisions about key interventions the charity should prioritise. For example, looking at the data collected from clients and the type of issues clients were reporting, trustees were able to conclude that increasing numbers of service users required support with benefits-related issues. As a result, trustees focused their efforts on increasing the organisational capacity and expertise in order to help clients grappling with these specific issues. After securing additional funding to support work in this area, OCAY was able to provide ad hoc training for staff and volunteers.
Why they won
The judges thought OCAY did really well in improving impact measurement as well as its governance, ensuring the board had the skills and information it required to function at its best. Judges praised the determination of trustees to learn more about organisational impact; trustees made sure they had clear pathways and processes to obtain and make use of users’ feedback on services, including things like ‘ease of access’, etc. Judges were also struck by the ability of the organisation to develop well thought-through measurement tools, which have enabled the charity to compare baseline information about clients with post-intervention feedback, and get an overall sense of the change the organisation is affecting for clients as a result. The judges also recognised the ability of trustees to use evidence to support changes in strategy like helping clients with claims for benefits. More specifically, judges noted that trustees have been very effective in using the learning emerging from their work with clients to better understand clients’ unmet needs, and have shaped the organisational strategic priorities and fundraising efforts accordingly.
