Proof is in the product

What is this obsession with measuring things? Why is the government so obsessed with the voluntary sector ‘proving’ through ‘evidence’ that it is worth working with? Does the government actually provide evidence that its policies are right or even working? Is that what the political process is really about?

In the private sector it’s easy to know if you are any good. If your product or service isn’t at the right price and of a quality that the purchaser wants then you can’t sell it and you go out of business. So levels of income and profit margins are an extremely good indicator of the value and quality of your product or service.

The public sector has a different problem, because essentially public services are a monopoly. We, the public, have no choices. We can’t choose not to buy them because forced taxation means that we have to pay anyway. Nor do we get to choose what our money is spent on, because that is, quite rightly, decided by politicians. So the only real test of their effectiveness is whether or not they win votes. And to win votes they have to prove they are doing a good job. Ergo, they have to invent more complex ways of measuring what they are doing to convince us to vote for them. Whether these actually demonstrate that the services are any good is another question.

But the voluntary sector stands outside of this. It is neither private sector nor public sector. It is unlike both. And to my mind the indicators of a voluntary organisation’s success are real and harder to achieve.

Voluntary organisations have to do five key things:

1. They have to recruit Trustees, who want to put their time and their personal reputations at risk for the benefit of the Charity - unpaid.
2. They have to attract volunteers to carry out the work of the charity
3. They have to attract funding – whether donations from the public, from trusts and foundations or from the state
4. They have to attract clever, capable staff who are prepared to work longer hours and for less money, with usually fewer benefits or perks, than they might earn elsewhere
5. And finally, and most importantly, they have to attract service users.

I stress that the latter is the most important indicator. Unlike in public service, in the voluntary sector your beneficiary or service user actually does have a choice. If they don’t like what you do or the way you do it they can walk away. And this is another reason why we need lots of charities doing similar things – because a service user deserves choice just as a purchaser of butter does.

So we need to stand our ground against this relentless pressure for us to produce reams of statistics, lengthy reports and so on to satisfy the needs of government bureaucracy. We do not need to prove ourselves in the way that the public sector does – because every single person who engages with us, either by giving to us, working for us or using our services, has absolute freedom of choice. Our focus should be on them above anything else. That is the only measurement that matters.

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