This is a key challenge when building our social movement 'we can move'.
Working with the Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West (part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research), we developed ways to measure the growth and impact of the movement.
One method which proved to be very successful was ripple effects mapping (REM).
REM is an interactive and engaging way of understanding the wider intended and unintended impacts of a project or programme over time.
You can find out more about the mechanics of REM through our recently published paper on how REM can be used to navigate the rivers of system change, and through the Putting it into practice resource by Sport England, which includes examples of other approaches, models and tools used by places to support a whole-system approach.
Over the three years I’ve worked at Active Gloucestershire, I’ve tested a variety of ways to capture the wider impact of our work and that of our network.
Often, the cause of failure was the level of additional administration required in recording the impact. But REM involved fun, interactive workshops and created an opportunity to bring people together to discuss what had happened.
This reduced the admin elements of capturing data, and also increased the quality of the learnings through the additional insight from the discussion between the participants.
Still, this method does have a few challenges:
- Firstly - recognising and accepting that much of the impact will be invisible to us and communicating that the findings from REM is a small snapshot of the wider impact is key.
- Secondly - how much detail do we capture? This is an area we are still testing and is often influenced by the aims of the project being evaluated.
- Thirdly - if REM is run with only internal staff, the wider impacts captured will be limited. The strength comes from bringing a wide range of people who are involved in or impacted by the project.
Using it in practice
At the time of writing this, we are building up to hosting our first 'we can move' network event to bring people from across the movement together, so the attendees can make new connections and pledge to incorporate physical activity in their work to make Gloucestershire a happy and healthy place to live and work.
We are using REM to measure the success and impact of this.
The workshops we have run so far have all been internal. And whilst the wider impacts captured are currently limited, they have facilitated a safe space for our team to share their thoughts on developing the event and initial feedback from their networks.
This has helped shape and improve the planning of the event and ensure everyone has clarity on their role, whilst building up a range of consequences and outcomes we are expecting from the event.
To manage the challenge of bringing people together to capture the wider impacts, we are providing opportunities during the event to share feedback and their pledges, then following this up with a post-event survey.
A purposeful engagement strategy for our team will follow, to utilise our relationships with attendees to capture longer-term impacts.
These will allow us to map out the intended and unintended consequences from the event and visualise any change in size and strength of 'we can move'.
REM has created a lot of excitement for capturing impact, not only at Active Gloucestershire, but with our partners – both locally and nationally.
It has become a core part of our evaluation toolkit and ARC West has developed a useful suite of training videos to help other organisations use it.
I’m excited to watch it develop and demonstrate impact further as more organisations discover it and use it.
