NGRF - UK National Guidance Research Forum

The tolls that we adopt to measure our impact has a few different approaches We intially use database information to follow up clients at the end of one month and then at six months. We send out letters to clients and at the moment are experiencing a reasonable level of response. The client is asked a to complete a questionnaire which involves as little free writing as we can design into the form to enable a quick completion but also to allow us to input data into a spreadsheet to analyse the outcomes. We also allocate some space for clients to write any comments and these are fed into our spreadsheet as well. Following the entry of the data, reports are run that enable us to show percentages of people who achieve "hard" outcomes based on the response rate. Additionally we also are starting to run focus groups that will allow clients to tell us about the quality of our service and when composing the focus groups we are trying to find numbers of people who are not major users of the service - in effect the groups who we are not reaching very well. We are also about to try to launch an e user group. That is clients who have received help via the internet and in this case trying to find out how we can improve this facet of our delivery. When the figures are to hand with the comments we enclose samples of the figures and comments with our follow up letters so that our clients get feed back as to what they are saying about our service. Finally we come to point where we have qualitative statements about the service and quantitive neasurements of the impact of the service. These measures we hope will enable us to focus our service in the light of research.