Measuring the impact of community development for Bullion Community Resource Centre

 
Bullion Community Resource Centre is a community hub in County Durham. It has a very diverse set of activities focused on improving social outcomes for its beneficiaries, for example, reducing poverty and social isolation, improving health and well-being, increasing resilience.
 
The request

Bullion Community Resource Centre wanted to improve how they measure the impact of their activities. They wanted to do this to help quantify their own operations and to provide evidence of the efficacy of their work to funding authorities.
 
The approach

Julian Roche was the volunteer statistician on this project. Julian met with Bullion, virtually, on a number of occasions to refine project requirements and operational constraints and to identify the main outcomes to be measured. Following a review of previous surveys at Bullion and a report by the Operational Research Society, a survey was designed to measure four main outcomes of interest to the charity along with demographic information.
 
The result

After a number of design reviews the survey questions were deployed on a web based survey tool. The survey was designed in accordance with best practice for measuring social impact. Questions were selected from public item banks to allow benchmarking with regional and national statistics. Due to Covid-19 we were unable to carry out the survey in the project time frame but the survey will enable Bullion Community Resource Centre to quantify key outcomes of interest going forward.
 
Impact and benefits

Belinda Lowis, development manager at Bullion Community Resource Centre commented:
 
As we re-emerge from the pandemic and welcome people back to our community centre, we have asked all of those who are now engaging with activities and support provision to complete our “welcome back” survey, which includes the key questions provided by Julian along with others to explore the impact of the lockdown. When we applied to Statisticians for Society for support we could not have imagined how this work would subsequently have to be conducted – mostly via Zoom and yet it worked remarkably well. Thank you to everyone for your support.