Gathering evidence on peer support is important for designing peer support programs, understanding what the peer program looks like (e.g., delivery of peer support groups), and demonstrating program impact (e.g., quality of life, ILC outcomes). Knowing ‘when, how, and what’ to gather evidence about is very important. In many cases, answers to these questions can be critical to peer program sustainability.

In general, gathering evidence about a peer program starts with planning to make sure we can answer not only the question of ‘did our peer program work’, but also ‘how it worked’. Overall, it is crucial to identify reliable measures, indicators, tools, and instruments that are relevant to overall peer program objectives.

The BSC approach enables us to structure evidence gathering on our peer program around four perspectives. Each perspective considers our location relative to our selected destination – our vision. This approach enables our focus to go beyond budgets and member satisfaction to consider performance and how we can illustrate our success to our various stakeholders. The BSC developed is unique within each peer program, because each peer organisation will have an individual vision, mission and strategy for achieving success.

The BSC can serve as your compass on the journey though the complex and fast changing nature of the disability marketplace toward your vision. You have considered the various stakeholders and perspectives of performance. You have also thought about the various objectives that you may wish to focus on. Nonetheless, how do you collect the evidence required to assess your location? The perspectives have given us the tools to use. We now know what measures are likely to inform us about our location. We now need to put this into use on a regular basis. Ideally, we want to develop a plan for how we will be able to gather the evidence we consistently need. What things do we need to keep records of? Who do we need to find out answers from? Who will know most about specialized areas of evidence that may be important to us? Who can generate timely information on the specific measures, or indicators, we have formulated?

In addition to considering who will be involved in the gathering of our evidence, we must also consider when we will gather it. How commonly should we be seeing where we are on our journey? Is this an annual exercise, or something more frequent? How often is it that we will need to gauge our location and understand if we are still ‘on track’? How regularly may we need to ‘rechart’ our course? Particularly if we are unsure of current conditions, or whether our boat is perfect in design, we may need to check frequently.

If there are various ways of checking our location, we may be able to perform quick examinations more often, and then do a more thorough assessment per annum? It may be that some of our evidence is gathered as part of our program design, so that it is always available as required? For example, it is likely that peer group facilitators regularly check attendance and may regularly ask members for feedback. Is there a mechanism in place to gather and track that evidence? Is attendance, budgetary information and team departures regularly reported already as part of the CEO’s report to your Board? A very effective way of starting to gather evidence is to consider what is already being collected in an informal way or for other purposes.

Key considerations for peer programs in terms of who and when to gather evidence will include:

  • Will our answers inform us about how our peer program worked?
  • Does this measure relate to the BSC objectives, relative to our vision?
  • Are we already gathering evidence we can use for this purpose?
  • What things do we already keep records of that could perhaps be used differently?
  • Who shall we gather answers from?
  • When shall we gather evidence, and how frequently shall we do this?
  • Do we need thorough assessment, or regular quick indicators?

If we require evidence that is not available from any existing source, we will need to design a way of gathering this. Many options/tools are accessible to assist us in our evidence harvesting process. We will be exploring this further in Module 5 where we consider ‘tool and collection specifics’.

Capsule: The Who and When considerations are important as they determine the overall ‘evidence gathering plan’. Using existing tools and information is most efficient, but regular checks of our location usually required the use of some tools (which we will next consider).

SELF STUDY Q4.17

Identify at least two possible sources of information already being collected that may be relevant to at least one of the objectives you have identified under the BSC perspectives.