The winners of the 9th Annual SIMNA Awards were announced at the virtual ceremony on Thursday 30 November 2023.
We extend our gratitude to everyone who entered the Awards this year, and our congratulations to all our finalists! Due to the high calibre of applications received, the judges’ scores were incredibly close, so this year we had one winner and two runners-up in each category. You can meet all the 2023 finalists here and read more about the awards ceremony here!
2023 SIMNA Awards Winners and Runners-Up
Winner
Monash Business School | Measuring the Impact of The One Box Program
The One Box (TOB) is an innovative Australian food relief charity established in 2017, operating across the five mainland states. Unlike other food relief charities which provide beneficiaries with one-off lots of rescued food, TOB operates through schools to provide weekly boxes of fresh fruit, vegetables, and bread to families in need for 40 weeks. This model addresses issues of stigma and shame experienced by recipients of rescued food, the poor nutritional value of rescued food, and not meeting recipients’ chronic needs.
In 2020, TOB and Monash Business School (MBUS) collaborated to evaluate the impact of TOB’s program. The research team from MBUS interviewed TOB staff, school coordinators, and beneficiaries to develop a social impact framework. The framework is used by TOB to evaluate and communicate the impact its program delivers to recipients. In a period of high inflation, and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, TOB’s work has had a significant impact on Australian families with school-aged children, and the research has helped TOB to understand, manage, and enhance its food relief program.
Runners-Up
National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) | NDIS Co-design Developmental Evaluation
The NDIA follows a “learn by doing” co-design approach in partnership with National Disability Insurance Scheme stakeholders to improve key Scheme processes, such as those identified by the Reform for Outcomes (RfO) agenda. These include enhancing evidence-based supports, workforce capability, planning, independent living, fraud prevention, and Scheme flexibility.
Co-design project working groups, including Disability Representative and Carer Organisations (DRCOs), NDIS participants, and government representatives progress the RfO agenda. The approach emphasises measurement and evaluation to understand what works and doesn’t, and what can be learned about the NDIS approach to co-design. This involves a developmental and realist evaluation approach, with short (2 month) and more traditional long learning loops (upon project completion) to explore what works, under what conditions, and for whom. It includes an embedded evaluator from the Agency’s Research and Evaluation Branch (REB), co-design of the evaluation framework, project working groups, and utilisation of a co-designed program logic to measure outcomes.
Redkite | Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration to Develop a Client Outcomes Framework
For 40 years, Redkite has provided essential emotional, financial, and practical support to children and families affected by childhood cancer. Ongoing outcomes measurement is critical to ensuring that they continually improve their services and demonstrate their social impact to their community and donors. Redkite has a dedicated Research, Evaluation, and Impact team responsible for conducting quality improvement evaluations and research projects.
In 2020, Redkite collaborated with families, team members, and health professionals to co-develop a Client Outcomes Framework and Theory of Change. This framework focuses on four key outcome areas: emotional and mental health and wellbeing, financial resilience and wellbeing, connection and social wellbeing, and empowerment. It serves as the foundation for all their research and evaluation efforts. They recently released their first Client Outcomes Report using this framework, highlighting their key evaluation findings and the impact of their services on the families they serve.
Winner
Hayball and Australian Social Value Bank | Measuring Social Value in Practice – A Pilot Study on CRT + YRD
Hayball is an Australian architectural practice focused on culture, community, and learning, and they’ve pioneered an initiative to measure the social value of design and architecture in Australia. They recognised that although architecture significantly impacts people’s well-being and communities, in Australia there was no quantitative method to assess this impact.
Hayball partnered with the Australian Social Value Bank (ASVB) to curate a framework with 15 key social outcomes and design features they can utilise to achieve social value through design. They tested this framework in a pilot study at CRT+YRD, a residential project in Melbourne, using resident surveys. Their pilot study proposed a method to assess social value through qualitative, quantitative, and monetised data. The study describes their methodology, key findings and limitations. It concludes with recommendations for translating the study’s findings in practice for architects and collaboration with the wider industry.
Runners-Up
GOAL College | Measure What Matters Survey Suite
GOAL College is an independent, co-educational senior secondary school that takes a different approach to the final years of high school. By valuing personal growth alongside academic learning, they help their students prepare for life after school. While most school success measures are based on academic and competitive outcomes; GOAL College wanted to measure other important developmental indicators such as confidence, growth mindset, ability to learn, perseverance, goal-setting, and readiness for work.
The Measure What Matters survey suite was developed for use exclusively within GOAL College. The surveys have been used across the entire school community since 2016 and have been refined over that period. These surveys, which are informed by international educational research, gather feedback on satisfaction and achievement from parents, students and staff, and were developed in response to a need to change the measures of success in high school education.
ReachOut | ReachOut’s Social Impact Framework
ReachOut is a leading online service supporting the mental health and well-being of young people. For over 25 years, they have provided free digital mental health support for young people and their families.
Due to the anonymous nature of their web-based self-help and non-clinical support, measuring and testing user outcomes is uniquely challenging. In addition, traditional digital analytics rely on output data, which plays a central role in understanding a website or digital platform’s value. As such, they needed to find a way to make sense of this outside of some of the constraints found in popular approaches to social value measurement, such as the causal assumptions inherent in logic models. Digital analytics can provide a myriad of data points, so they needed to identify the data that was material to exploring and capturing their social value within the sea of data available to them. It is against this background that they developed a unique, innovative approach to social impact measurement.
Winner
For-Purpose Evaluations | Guide Dogs Australia Social Impact Measurement Framework
Guide Dogs Australia (GDA) brings together four separate member organisations: Guide Dogs NSW/ACT, Guide Dogs QLD, Guide Dogs SA/NT and Guide Dogs Victoria. They exist to support people with low vision or blindness (LV&B) to live the life they choose. Guide Dogs services include: occupational therapy, orientation and mobility training, psychology, social and community supports and placing guide dogs (seeing eye dogs). They also undertake research, advocacy and community education. This work is funded predominantly through philanthropy, as well as from the NDIS packages of eligible clients.
Over the past two years GDA have developed a national Social Impact Measurement (SIM) Framework, with the objective of knowing when and how we are making a difference with our individual services, and where they can do better. For-Purpose Evaluations partnered with GDA to develop the SIM Framework. The Framework was developed over the course of 2022 and piloted in the first half of 2023. They will continue to iterate the Framework and use it to better understand their impact into the future.
Runners-Up
Milk Crate Theatre | Milk Crate Theatre Social Impact
Milk Crate Theatre has always been dedicated to social impact, documenting changes in their communities through the collection of stories, without explicitly labelling it as social impact measurement. In 2021, they officially committed to enhancing their understanding and presentation of how their programs impact individuals facing mental illness, disability, or homelessness.
They refined their Theory of Change that year and, in 2022, hired an Impact Manager, who initiated the development of an Impact Measurement Framework, surveys, and interview schedules. After a testing phase, they released their first public Impact Report in August 2022, using three months of data and insights gained from community consultations and expert input. Subsequently, two more Impact Reports have been published, and Milk Crate Theatre is now leading other organisations in the arts and cultural sector to invest more in impact measurement. They are hosting a Social Impact Roundtable for the arts and culture sector in early 2024 and are inviting organisations to join a project that they are leading next year.
The Salvation Army | The Salvation Army’s National Youth Services Outcome Measurement
The Salvation Army (TSA) Youth Services offer an integrated suite of targeted programs that engage young people across Australia on their journey to independence. Service delivery responses include programs related to: alcohol and other drugs, chaplaincy, driver training, employment and training, education, and homelessness.
Since December 2020, TSA’s Research Team has developed and implemented the Youth Services Outcomes Measurement Framework to assess and evaluate the effectiveness and impact of their interventions. Guided by best practice literature and informed by the Youth Services Model of Care, Youth Services objectives/funding requirements, and consultations with Youth Managers, frontline teams and youth advisory groups, the framework identified five overarching youth outcome domains which were mapped to TSA’s Stronger Communities Domains and funders’ outcome frameworks. Following a 12-month pilot phase and a comprehensive feedback process, national rollout of the framework was completed in July 2023. Various stakeholders collaborated to refine the framework’s structure and functionality, while the pilot phase served as a testing ground, verifying the measures, and addressing potential implementation challenges.