Case study

Suppose your organisation has contracts from local government and other funders to deliver these services:

  • Advocacy services for clients who need help accessing NHS services
  • Tracking Independent Mental Health Assessments
  • A Healthy Eating initiative

Made an Impact is therefore set up to have three services available: Advocacy, IMHA and Healthy.

For the Advocacy service for example, users are referred to you or can drop in to access your service. The referral form is set up to have the fields you need.

For each referral, you can have one or more sessions with the service user – and you need to record how long you spend with them, your travelling time, and time spent afterwards following up. You can add notes and scans of any received documents eg a letter from their GP.

Some referrals are complicated so you can record one or more issues for the user, eg homelessness, drug use or debt. For each issue you can record actions that you or the client are taking – and can record when these are done. Any incomplete actions are on your to-do list.

For the Healthy Eating service you can set up a form that can be filled in several times over the course of the project. You can then report on progress for the individual – and that achieved overall.

Monitoring your outputs and outcomes is crucial for your contracts - Made an Impact has many reports built in. The output can be viewed in a spreadsheet such as Excel, allowing you to fine tune the report and produce whatever further analysis or graphs are needed. Reports can drill down into the data, for example reporting by service, over particular time periods and using any diversity data that you have recorded.