Impact: Catalyst Project – Improving community services through the power of data

Evidence-based evaluation of public service programmes helps councils to target areas with the highest impact potential and to allocate scarce resources through informed decision making. The University’s Catalyst Evaluation Team supported local authority initiatives targeted at helping vulnerable community members. The team developed robust, credible evaluation metrics and tools to conduct evaluations of completed, ongoing and future projects.

One of the most impactful relationships was with Essex County Fire and Rescue Services (ECFRS), working with their Home Safety Team, initially to evaluate their Parish Safety Volunteers Programme, and eventually to establish evaluation methods for their Home Safety Department as a whole. The work won impact awards for collaboration, and the methods are still in use at ECFRS today.

Our team also worked with West Suffolk Council in evaluating their social prescribing LifeLink programme which helped the LifeLink managers justify requests to extend and continue providing the service.

A key element of the team’s work was developing the Spotlight Toolkit, created to empower local authorities by educating them about evaluation and teaching them how to design evaluations to suit their own demands.

The Catalyst Risk Stratification team’s academic expertise in data analytics and visualisation helped to uncover patterns and offer innovative predictive insight to help decision-making in public service initiatives aimed at helping vulnerable groups.

The Team focused on four areas:

• Children at risk of going into care
• MASH (Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub)
• NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training)
• School readiness

The Team’s expertise in data analytics enabled partners to better understand what they could achieve with the social care and education data they held, and allowed them to think strategically about their data, including the implementation of consistent and accurate data collation processes.

The project also allowed the partners to upskill their in-house data analysts and will, in the longer term, allow them to prevent and manage increasing pressures on public services by identifying community members at highest risk of becoming vulnerable to provide timely responses and targeted interventions.

A major aim of the Catalyst Project was to stimulate activity between the University and communities in Colchester and surrounding areas by strengthening existing community-based volunteering activity, developing new volunteering opportunities and increasing the up-take of student volunteering and time spent volunteering.

Working with the Essex Students’ Union VTeam, the Catalyst Project launched the Essex Volunteering Hub (EVHub), a single and sustainable one-stop-shop offering easy access for students to all the student volunteering opportunities offered by University groups, local community groups, non-profit and public sector organisations.

The new EVHub has:

• Increased choice of volunteering opportunities offered
• Established new connections with local communities
• Allowed the VTeam to strengthen the range of regular volunteering projects with local schools, care homes, charities, refugee centre, community centres and encourage students to take action and tackle social issues
• Increased the range of transferable skills that students can acquire, offering benefits to their personal development and wellbeing, studies and subsequent employability
• Enhanced the existing relationship between the University, our local communities and local voluntary sector partners