Family and service needs – insight from complex data
Families InFocus (FiF) is a leading independent parent-led registered charity providing support to families of children with disabilities and special needs (aged 0 to 25) across Essex. They provide practical and emotional support on issues such as education, disability benefits, social care and housing.
The request
The project had three key aims:
- to understand better the needs of families in Essex
- to improve and streamline reporting processes
- to improve the online survey to collect more useful, actionable data
The approach
Data was gathered from the Office for National Statistics, and FiF’s own survey and contact management systems. Each source was closely reviewed and time was taken to understand all of the key features of the data, which was transformed where necessary for ease of analysis. Various time series, visualisations and tabular results were created and presented. This led to a number of changes to the structure, style and content of the questionnaire to improve the measurement of the Charity’s impact on its users. A new methodology was designed, built and implemented that greatly eased the production of FiF’s quarterly Operational Report.
The result
Results were shared in tranches during the project. Amongst other things, this showed how FiF’s families compared with those in the local general population and identified trends over six years. Changes over three years were presented from user feedback gathered from the Charity’s own survey. The overall results were encapsulated in a full report released at the end of the project. This repeated some of the key findings and made a number of recommendations including questionnaire improvements, tidying up of the contact management database and laid out a new process for the easy production of the core quarterly Operational Report which reduced the production time from one day to less than 30 minutes.
Impact and benefits
The project has refined how we ask people about the impact of our support in a way that is user- friendly but also easy to analyse. We have been able to articulate and measure the need for our services amongst existing data sets, and improve how we work with the data we collect. This work has played a large part in the development of our new organisational strategy and how build cases for future funding. We are really grateful for the support of Statisticians for Society, and for the support of our volunteer, Mark.