British Safety Council
British Safety Council is a UK-based charity committed to promoting health, safety, and wellbeing across workplaces globally. It provides health, safety & wellbeing services to support workers to be safer and healthier.
The challenge
NPC was commissioned to help British Safety Council develop a purpose roadmap that shows how their activities link to their overall purpose and support operationalising their strategy. Over the previous year, a new vision, mission and purpose for the organisation was agreed, and there were a number of internal programmes of work intended to help British Safety Council measure, evaluate and communicate its impact more effectively.
In essence, the ‘what’ of British Safety Council had been captured in detail, and NPC was commissioned to map the ‘how’ and help them measure achievements against this.
The approach
Our work with British Safety Council proceeded in three stages:
- Critical friend – reviewing what they have previously produced and giving feedback
- Developing a roadmap – mapping out how their activities lead to outcomes and impact
- Considering measurement – providing topline recommendations for indicators and how to measure against them.
NPC began by exploring British Safety Council’s current internal documentation to assess its current articulation of impact, guided by our Theory of Change in 10 steps resource.
We then worked with them to produce a roadmap detailing how the charity’s activities contribute to its social mission. This included grouping services into broad buckets of activity (‘Audit, Consultancy & Training’, ‘Membership / Supporters’, ‘Awards & Events’, and ‘Impact & Influence’), identifying layers of short-, medium- and longer-term changes, and categorising the different elements as ‘health & safety’, ‘wellbeing’, and ‘policy’ respectively.
Having drafted the roadmap, we worked with British Safety Council to design a balanced scorecard with topline recommendations of indicators and measuring against them. We adapted the traditional balanced scorecard format for the council’s social mission by including the following sections:
- Impact for workers: Charitable outcomes (e.g. improved health & safety and wellbeing outcomes for workers and other stakeholders) and British Safety Council services being rated high quality by clients
- Financial: Income generation, margin, client/member and donor retention etc
- Internal processes: Efficiency, quality of service / delivery, and employee retention
- Learning & growth: Expansion to new locations, new partnerships and products / programmes, employee development, and being responsive to data & learning.
We then used our five types of data to identify indicators for measuring progress against its charitable and commercial outcomes.
The result
We had an idea on the direction we needed to go in following the instigation of a purpose upgrade project, however, we needed a critical friend to evaluate what we had done, providing direction on where to go next and giving us the charitable technical support that we lacked. We had already completed a fair amount of work and didn’t want to throw that all away.
NPC adjusted their approach to what we needed, applying the general principles but in a way that aligned with our stage of progress. Able to liaise at all levels, they also provided the credibility and support we needed to gain buy-in from our board of trustees. We are now in a solid position to move forward with the refreshed charitable focus of the organisation.
Paul Fakley
Marketing & Engagement Director
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