Bringing home the money

Don't be embarassed to ask for money!

Time and time again I talk to charities and public sector workers who can't ask for the money they need to deliver the service people deserve. Money isn't dirty. Money isn't evil. Even the love of money isn't evil. Money is like energy - you use it for good, or you use it for bad, and the more that passes via you the more you can achieve.

On Monday I gave a workshop on Evaluating Innovation at the "New Ways of Working in Health and Social Care" conference in Manchester. My theme helped innovation make the leap from prospective funding (looks like a good idea, here's something to get you started) to sustainable long-term funding (fantastic - we get all this and you only need this much per user to run the service). I picked on measurement, because it's often the weakest part of many proposals - how can you show that you are making a difference?

The points are these:

• commissioners are people too: they will put money into innovation that looks likely to succeed - and you can show that you have already succeeded by showing the results you achieve (and show you mean business by submitting to evaluation)
• there is a finite amount of money - but it is enormous (health for example has £100billion to spend). If you can show that your idea will deliver more 'bang per buck' in the things that matter - care, outcomes, patient satisfaction, value for money (and not even all of these: if we wanted to save money on health we'd still be spending £42billion not £100billion), and raise it up the priorities list above competing projects, then you will get funded - provided you can generate enough confidence that you can succeed

Get a sponsor/ mentor. Do a great thing. Dare to dream. And be quite open and honest about the resources you need!


Good luck! Hugo

How to Measure?

All too often, new initiatives (new ways of delivering care or support) can't show whether they have made a difference because nobody measured.
Why is this? Some sort of number-phobia, a philosophical view that since the service is somehow sacred, to measure and show "this much benefit", or "that much cost-effectiveness" would taint the service delivered. But it can be really crippling when you go to a backer and ask for resources to build or expand your service.
What criteria should you apply?
You need measures that mean something to:

• the organisation which will provide the funding (so they can see what they are getting for their money)
  
• the person or group receiving help (the voice of the user is very important in demonstrating whether your service delivers a benefit)
• the team delivering the service (typically these will be the ones gathering the information, and if they aren't motivated then they won't put the effort in to collecting the measures)

Uner ideal circumstances you would get everyone to decide the measures they would like to see, and then discuss how practical it is to collect these. Ideal doesn't often happen, and in the end the team collecting the measures have to agree to collect them, so as a shortcut can I recommend getting the staff together to decide? They will typically understand the user perspective closely (we're talking about new projects and new services so the reasons why the service was needed and has been set up will be high on everyone's agenda), and as long as someone plays the part of any potential funding body you should get measures which cover all angles.

Second stage is often to ensure that the measures selected are practical. Evaluation should never be at the expense of care delivered - which means few, simple measures demonstrating clear results.

Of course there may be governance issues - if you are collecting information about vulnerable people (children, vulnerable adults, healthcare patients) then do you need permission? What information are you collecting and is it possible to identify the patient? Where are you going to store the information collected - is it secure? All this means that you probably have to seek permission from a governance or evaluation scrutiny committee and woe betide anyone who starts measuring before ensuring they can collect measures, especially if the scrutiny committee finds that the information they are collecting needs special care!

To evaluate results you are going to need some understanding of statistics. A good start point is "Statistics without tears" or the "for dummies" guides. You don't need to get worried about Sampling Theory - in order to apply this you need to know how much difference you expect, and to be blunt if you think you are only going to make a small difference this may be enough in the commercial setting but in delivery of care or support a small difference isn't going to win you the funding you seek.

Know enough statistics to be able to compare two groups (the before and the after) using something like

• Chi squared (where the result is Yes or No eg for "Happy or Sad", "needed hospital/ did not", "working/ not working") and
  
• t-test (or Analysis of Variables/ ANOVA/ MANOVA) where the measure is on a scale ("this happy 1 - 5", "care involved this many steps")

and how to a run chart to show variability and the effect of the change (SPC - Statistical Process Control) and draw bar charts and pie charts which everyone understands.

Aim to present your results in as simple a way as possible - we'll look at Cash and Financials in another blog


Part of Chapter 4
Once you've measured you need to

Attracting volunteers and trustees

Voluntary sector organisations are often on the look out for the right skills to further their development.
For Trustees, the best source is National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) - Chris Bell and Marie Lovell forwarded this site. http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/askncvo/TrusteeGovernance/trusteebank
NCVO also recommend an introductory service, REACH online (http://www.reach-online.org.uk/) which links volunteers with skills to organisations needing those skills.

Tips for writing business cases

1. It’s not what you do (how you write it, language, length, etc) it’s who you talk to

1. What are their needs (personal needs such as recognition - actually it’s quite important to recognise this)
2. What are their priorities (if your service is essentially a primary care service and you work in a hospital, why would they want to put resources into it? Who should you pitch your idea to?)
3. What are they measured on (for example, Local Authorities have picked 35 indicators from the 198 in the new booklet “new performance framework for local authorities” from the Communities and Local Government web site – identify which buttons your service pushes, identify which buttons your local authorities have chosen to be measured on, and emphasise the matching bits in your proposal)
4. What pushes their buttons

2. Why are you doing this?

1. What’s the evidence that there’s a need? Present it
2. What’s the evidence that it will work (eg from other sites)? Present or at least acknowledge it
3. What are the cost/benefits? (what do service users do if they don’t have your service? How much does that cost? Who pays?)
4. Will it work? (what are the risks, resource implications, do you have answers to the simple questions?)

3. Who should you present to?

1. From talking to people in 1) you should identify who the best funders are, who you want on your team as a figure-head, for credibility, or for all sorts of reasons not least that it’s lonely doing it on your own and you want company. But if you want financials worked out then get someone credible to the funding body to work out the financials, eg someone in their own finance department – that way you don’t have to pay for the service either!) Then give them credit
2. What’s their timetable? Do they receive bids at a particular time of year, from a particular type of organisation, have a cycle of cases? Do they only fund successful organisations? What about assistance preparing the bid? (you’d be surprised, Urgent Care Limited got start-up funding to help initial costs, finds for legal costs and bid preparation costs and all sorts before the money started flowing in earnest)
3. What is the accepted route (do they have subcommittees and screening committees? For your own sanity don’t present to anyone who isn’t relevant to the funding, because they don’t like it either. But do work the process – the more difficult it is the fewer other people will have stayed the course)