OPEN Forum: Evidence everywhere, everyday, everyone.

Presenters: Dr Mandy Charman from OPEN and Melissa Storey, Senior Editor of Children Australia.

Overview

This webinar, with presenters from OPEN and the Children Australia journal, celebrated how far the child and family services sector has come on its Outcome Journey and shared some easy steps to get going with everyday evidence – building on your own everyday evidence and using the existing evidence base.

This webinar is relevant to all child and family services, as the sector moves towards outcome focused and evidence-driven service delivery. The session highlights how far the sector has come, tips on how to get going and recognising that evidence is everywhere, used everyday and by everyone across the sector.

Key Messages

1. Success lies in the design -use a theory of change/logic to define your program on a page
   • A strong design process supports program success
   • Define ‘what success looks like’ with a theory of change /program logic, clarify your short, medium and long-term outcomes in plain language for effective communication and a unified team objective
   • Simple and consistent data collection methods linked to your program logic supports time efficient and cost effective measurement and reporting
   • Better to use simple data collection well, than complex methods poorly. You can get a lot of value from simple techniques
2. Improvement throughout program and organisational evidence use
   • A culture of continuous improvement through ongoing reflection, monitoring and sharing learnings with stakeholders supports the program lifecycle
   • ‘Critical friends’ and support networks of experienced evaluators can support navigating evaluation and data collection, often providing additional advice and perspectives on ‘what works’, assisting in implementing monitoring and evaluation plans
   • A strong organisational evidence culture will provide an efficient and consistent approach through embedding evidence practices and systems, building evidence capability and using evidence collected to inform decisions
3. Using the existing evidence base
   • Ensure you have a clear research question and stop your search based on the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence you have found that is aligned with your research question
   • Assess quality evidence through indexed research databases such as, Pubmed and Scopus
   • Document all your search parameters, keywords and sources systematically to avoid missing critical information, or having to re-do evidence gathering throughout different stages of identifying the issue or problem.