This is a CTP of initiative: Spice (UK)
This CTP concerns Spice monitoring, evaluation, communication and outreach policies that have enabled Spice to lobby and market its offer successfully.
As a civil society organization, and in common with many other social innovation organizations, Spice is a values-based organization. “We have three driving values: ‘people are change maker’s, which is fairly self- explanatory; ‘together we work’, which is the whole idea that communities are built most effectively with people, organizations and services working in partnership; and ‘change-that-is-meaningful’. The ‘change-that-is-meaningful’ value is the one that essentially states that investment in communities should be predicated on ability to demonstrate the change that it can create.”
Whereas conventional Time Banks have software to organise and record transactions, Spice issues time credits as paper credit notes. This imposes different monitoring requirements on the organization. In contrast to automated digital data capture, the use of a paper currency makes monitoring more difficult for Spice. “It's tough to track paper currencies and we use quite archaic data capture. We still use spreadsheets and all the spreadsheets then get agglomerated and stuck into a bigger spreadsheet until in the end we spit out the high level data. We ask for data from every single note within the Spice time credit network. So every participating community group needs to feed its data up to its host organization, how many new members, how many hours issued, and then the host organization has to feed its data up to us and then we have to agglomerate data to create the national picture, which is tricky. The world being the world and people being people, people don't always get their data in on time or they get their data in but it's not accurate. It's tricky, because we're reliant on this network, this sort of upwelling network of trust.”
Despite the difficulties, Spice implemented a reporting policy from the outset, and thereby has been able to monitor growth in the level of membership and activities on a consistent and comprehensive basis, albeit that the system is not necessarily the most efficient and accurate.
In parallel with the monitoring effort there is a separate activity charged with evaluating the impact of Spice. An independent evaluation agency has this responsibility, which is intended to ensure an impartial evaluation and enhance legitimacy. To date, Spice has been able to use the gathered information in various ways: to lobby policymakers, to market Spice to service commissioners and to report back to commissioners and local/regional governments to demonstrate the effectiveness of investments in Spice. Attention is paid to developing attractive graphics that visualise the growth, effectiveness and impact of Spice and highlight the versatility of the mechanism. The slide stacks are made available to interested parties, including sponsors so that they can also easily illustrate the effectiveness and impact of sponsorship, which is needed to justify investment.
Spice has a policy of outreach to potential commissioners, making presentations at local authority conferences and conventions attended by commissioners and making sure that potential commissioners are informed about the time credits mechanism and its effectiveness in different sectors and areas of application. It has also developed a policy of integrating Spice operatives and representatives within the organisations that commission Spice projects.
In these ways, Spice becomes institutionalised within the agencies that commission its services. Furthermore, as knowledge of Spice becomes more widespread among local authorities, health trusts and others potential commissioners, the commissioners themselves become agents in the further evolution of Spice, asking how might Spice help me deliver in my area of responsibility? On this basis, for example, the initiative to use Spice in the context of a rehabilitation programme for ex-substance abusers did not come from Spice (the organisation), but from the agency responsible for developing rehabilitation programmes.
Monitoring and evaluation procedures have therefore been important in competence development, especially competence in building and maintaining relations with influential actors and in successful networking with commissioners. This has shaped Spice as an organization. It no longer has to generate and ‘sell’ ideas about how to use time credits. Service commissioners also now develop their own ideas about how they might use time credits. This represents a breakthrough for the organization.
From when Spice was established the new organisation was able to draw on the monitoring and evaluation of the Blaengarw Time Centre experiments, benefitting from the work of the forerunner WICC project. The monitoring and impact data collected at Blaengarw were important for demonstrating the effectiveness of the new model of Time Credits and in lobbying for further trails and demonstrations to explore the transferability of the mechanism to other contexts.
The emerging monitoring procedures engage Spice members at every level in the organization in the monitoring task. Individual members of Spice provide joining information. As the paper currency cannot be tracked digitally, it is the responsibility of group leaders to gather information on the membership of their group, new members, group size, activity levels, credits issued, etc. These data are agglomerated at the next higher level by the local area or regional representative. All local areas where Spice is operating report their data to the national level to create a national picture. The coherent reporting chain within the organization has contributed to the capacity to co-produce monitoring reports, which are valuable for internal and external purposes.
Spice separately distinguishes between monitoring and evaluation. Evaluation is outsourced to ensure impartiality. Outcomes are ultimately co-produced by those who produce and those who use the information, which include a wide range of internal and external stakeholders at all levels of governance and decision making, including policy makers, foundations and investors, commissioners, and local authorities, but also partner organisations in the earning and spending networks and the individuals who decide to become members of Spice. Senior figures within Spice make use of monitoring and evaluation materials for internal and external purposes.
Spice was established in 2008 to follow on the work begun by WICC. WICC had developed a person-to-agency model of time exchange, which had been trialled and further developed in Blaengarw. The adaptation of issuing paper time credits to recognise and reward community service and these being exchangeable to access events, services or facilities had first been developed during the Blaengarw trial. Important events in this were the first acceptances of time credits as alternatives to cash payments for entry to events by The Creative Development Trust andother local groups.
Spice as an organization was established to develop and promote time credits and, in particular, to particular, to establish whether the success achieved at Blaengarw could be replicated elsewhere. Experimentation, monitoring and evaluation were therefore integral to its mandate and mission. They were enshrined in one of the underpinning principles of the organization.
An important test involved replicating what had been tried successfully in Blaengarw, a small and remote community with around 4000 inhabitants in the Welsh Valleys, in other contexts. Establishing trials in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales and a major and populous urban centre, was an important first step in this.
Effectively, the rolling out of Spice has been implemented through a set of monitored and evaluated experiments and demonstrations, such that the overall programme has developed as a rolling programming along the lines of gathering information and evidence about progress and impact, learning from this, and implementing a real-time feedback loop into ongoing operations involving fine-tuning of existing projects, applying lessons when designing next projects, and informing at the level of strategy and tactics.
Monitoring, evaluation and communication were important from the outset for Spice, since the organisation was founded on the evidence base of Blaengarw and needed to develop further evidence of the effectiveness and impact of incentivised/rewarded person-to-agency volunteering in order to pursue its mission. Its mission also depended upon building relationships with commissioners. These, too, are formed and re-enforced on the basis of effective communication of evidence showing that the mechanism delivers wanted social impacts and is cost effective.
In this sense, important events include the demonstration projects and the winning of contracts and commissions to develop these, since these provide the basis for monitoring, evaluation, evidence gathering, communicating and marketing. Important early projects in this succession included those in Cardiff and the four English local authority areas and an InterReg project that provided opportunity for Spice to be developed, monitored, evaluated and compared with other community currencies operating in other countries, regions and localities within Europe. Winning the grant to provide for Spice to be extended into England was an important event, since this paved the way not only for extending Spice operations, but also for extending the related monitoring, evaluation and learning programme.
The coming to office of the coalition government in 2010 and its promotion of the Big Society policy agenda was an important event, since this provided a policy framework conducive for Spice and created a receptive audience among policy makers, funders and commissioners for the evidence-based message Spice could deliver. It also paved the way for the extension of operations to England. The Big Society policy agenda, the trend toward evidence-based policymaking and Spice operations with integral monitoring, evaluation and learning were all aligned with each other and were mutually supportive and re-enforcing.
The first report of the independent evaluators was published in 2014 and an event was held to deliver the (positive) outcome based on the early years of Spice. Reports have been published regularly since then. These are major events in establishing the legitimacy and credibility of Spice and elevating its status among external stakeholders.
There have been some issues related to the amount of information being collected and also to intrusiveness. “We've had some [issues], yeah, the typical stuff. We live in funder-land too and there have certainly been things that funders wanted to know that we struggled to respond to in a way that would not compromise how we like to relate to the people we work with. That has happened, but nothing too horrendous.”
The findings of the external (independent) evaluation have indicated positive impacts. Spice is in a phase of rapid development, so the operation experiences upfront costs in developing infrastructure. The sustainability and cost-effectiveness of Spice operations over the longer term will only be known with time.
The approach to monitoring and evaluation that has paved the way to developing strong relations with external (establishment) actors and stakeholders was enshrined in the principles upon which Spice as an organisation was founded. Important here is that the principles have been made operational through a commitment to continuous monitoring of activity and external evaluation of impact on the one hand and to strategic and tactical use of gathered information and evidence on the other hand. This has helped in developing strong relations with investors and commissioners.
Monitoring, the tracking of activities and what is happening within an organization, is a challenge, particularly for new organizations operating on social values. “Spice has this thirst for information, we love the stuff, and we are constantly working on different things and how to grab data. We are not particularly brilliant at deciding what to do with it, so we ask too many questions and I think we are learning. One of our pieces of learning as an organization is to ask fewer, better questions and also thinking about the degree to which we're being invasive and being overbearing in the manner in which we ask. “
Spice is working to further improve its monitoring and its information gathering and processing capabilities by shifting from paper and manual systems to automation.
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