Measuring impact real-time: How new data technologies could help us demonstrate our impact – by Robin Houterman

Measuring impact in the Walled Garden

As described in a recent Working Paper by the Third Sector Research Centre, third sector organisations are making more and more of an effort to measure their impact on individuals, communities and society as a whole. Presumably, as is suggested in the Working Paper, this is a result of an (perceived) increased pressure to demonstrate results from (state) financiers and encouragement via new legislation, both in the context of a trend towards evidence-based policy-making.

It is clear that measuring impact can help enormously to convince people about the need for certain projects. Yet conventional ways of data collection are not usually helpful in measuring impact on a regular basis and on the desired level. Thus although in general data has become much more accessible in the last decade through all kinds of online open data initiatives, this data is not always collected and published on the required scale or appropriate interval.
In short, we would enormously benefit from more dynamic, responsive tools that provide us the data to measure the impact of our projects on individual people and communities. The use of mobile phone applications seems a promising way of collecting this kind of data.

Examples of applications I’m thinking of seem to be already quite advanced in the medical world, where smart phones for example help to measure sleep, food intake, exercise, blood sugar and other physiological states and behaviours. This gives doctors insight into the effects of treatments and helps change the behaviour of users.

Something that comes a bit closer to measuring the potential impact of our projects is the LSE’s application to measure happiness, Mappiness. The application prompts users on a daily basis to provide feedback about how happy they feel at a particular time and place. This data is then used to draw conclusions on how people’s happiness is influenced by their environment (eg if people feel happier in a quiet park than in a busy and noisy street). The application measures in real-time and continuously over a long period of time, giving researchers the possibility to track changes on a daily basis as well as in the long term.

To me one of the great advantages of this kind of technology is that, as Mappiness does, it gives direct feedback to users. It thus becomes possible for users to see the impact of a project on them or the wider community. This makes it more attractive and rewarding for people to participate.

Smart phone applications also make it possible to add in elements of gaming. It is now well known that “gamification” can be a powerful tool to increase engagement and even to change people’s behaviour. Check for example this site to see some inspiring examples of what gamification can do. Adding game elements to applications for measuring impact could make participating more fun and thus increase response rates in comparison with conventional methods.

The next step for these kinds of applications would be to become more open-source and easily adaptable. For Clear Village, it would for example mean that we could tailor an application to measure in real-time how safe residents feel in Tottenham’s Alleys before and after interventions, collect data on the intensity and quality of community interaction as a result of our Small Works programme, or track the increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables among Harold Hill residents as a result of our Walled Garden project. Moreover, with the help of these kinds of applications our own Well-Being Analysis could become a real-time tool to monitor the changing needs of a particular community, allowing us to develop projects that are immediately responsive to local people’s needs.

We, at Clear Village, are not application developers ourselves, but we do have some clear ideas about the opportunities these kinds of applications offer. We look forward to any opportunity to contribute to their development!