Meet the 2024 SIMNA Awards Winners and Runners Up
The winners of the 10th Annual SIMNA Awards were announced at the virtual ceremony on Thursday 28 November 2024.
We extend our gratitude to everyone who entered the Awards this year and our congratulations to all our winners, runners up and finalists! You can meet our 2024 finalists here and read more about this year’s winners in this article by Matthew Schulz, journalist, SmartyGrants.
Winner
Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal | Investing in Rural Community Futures (IRCF)
The IRCF pilot program originated from FRRR’s 2017 Impact Report which reviewed 15 years of funding activity and highlighted a gap in support for organisational capacity building. This was evidenced by a high percentage of unsuccessful applications to FRRR for resourcing and capacity building. The Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation (VFFF) approached FRRR to explore options to address this gap in line with their own strategy.
IRCF was created as a place-based investment totalling $5 million over five years, with $1 million in direct grants in each of the three participating communities. Significant investment and emphasis were placed on a responsive action-research methodology of program evaluation. As well as creating direct community impact, the program tested a new model of community support comprising; a community roadmap; partnership grants throughout the program supporting capacity building initiatives; a local Community Facilitator role to coach, mentor, and support collaboration; collaborative ‘toolbox’ grants to support responsive collective impact via an expedited grants process; a digital information hub; and multi-faceted program evaluation (delivered in person and online) to support ongoing learning and program evolution. On the basis of the evaluation results, this program has received philanthropy support for implementation in regional Victoria, commencing late 2024.
Runner up
Ecstra Foundation | Impact Measurement Framework
Ecstra is a grant-making foundation committed to improving financial wellbeing(FWB) in Australia. Ecstra works with partners in communities, schools and other learning environments to map, design, deliver and measure financial education initiatives that help build individual financial literacy, capability and confidence. They also provide grants and support to consumer and community organisations in their work to address the many structural barriers to financial inclusion and economic security. The Australian FWB ecosystem is fractured and has historically lacked consistent measurement methodology and capability, partly due to structural underinvestment.
Ecstra has committed $23m of grant funding over four years to address these issues and the overall national decline in financial wellbeing. They seek to identify, fund and share effective approaches to building FWB. Their custom-built Outcomes Framework and tools efficiently integrate, measure and report FWB outcomes. These results underpin their advocacy efforts for a holistic, nationally coordinated approach to building financial wellbeing in Australia.
Winner:
Latitude Network | ACE Data Collaboration
The ACE Data Collaboration project arose from the need for Adult and Community Education Providers to demonstrate their impact to funders and work together as a sector. Recognising the power of collective intelligence, the project facilitates secure data sharing and analysis across the sector. Social impact measurement is central to this initiative, enabling organisations to track student demographics, needs and outcomes (both end of course and longer term ‘employment ladder’ outcomes), and to benchmark their performance against peers. The sector serves people not able to access the mainstream education system, including migrants with low English skills, people with disabilities and people with social disadvantages.
By sharing and analysing this data, organisations can identify areas for improvement, adopt best practices and advocate for change, ultimately leading to a more effective and equitable education system. The project has been built and is now live. Data is being pulled at an individual level for 42,000 students across five datasets and 100 data fields – it’s a large-scale data impact project, with more data refreshed daily. Plans for 2025 include reporting on social impact, setting benchmarks, and doing ‘big data’ analysis on what factors drive outcomes and student satisfaction.
Runner up
Starlight Children’s Foundation | The Third Birthday Party Initiative
Aboriginal children, particularly in remote areas, face higher rates of serious and preventable health conditions compared to other Australian children. To address this, the Starlight Children’s Foundation (Starlight), guided by its Theory of Change, partnered with Cherbourg Health Service, SQRH and Western Sydney University’s (WSU) Indigenous Health Unit to pilot a “birthday party” event in Cherbourg, Queensland. The initiative aimed to reach children impacted by intergenerational trauma in healthcare and break down barriers by providing all three-year-olds with health checks in a culturally sensitive, appealing, and positive environment.
Health service providers and Starlight Captains (professional performers) collaborated to create a party atmosphere that made the health checks more engaging and less intimidating for children. Starlight’s Theory of Change ensured the program was designed for measurable impact, focusing on improving children’s healthcare experiences. Data were collected using a culturally informed, age-appropriate approach to gather satisfaction feedback from children and caregivers, along with semi-structured interviews with staff and health professionals, which were recorded, de-identified, and analysed. This pilot program and evaluation approach aligns with Starlight’s mission to improve health outcomes and highlights the value of co-designed, culturally respectful interventions, offering a model for improving healthcare access and engagement for First Nations children.
Winner:
The Salvation Army | Flexibility in evaluation with culturally diverse victim-survivors of family violence: going beyond “doing no harm”
The Carinya Therapeutic Program was developed by The Salvation Army Carinya Women and Children’s Service, in partnership with Women Illawarra. The program was funded to support victim-survivors of family violence that are unable to access timely therapeutic interventions due to extensive waiting periods in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven (NSW). This important impact measurement project aimed to examine outcomes and benefits of the pilot therapeutic program for women and children accessing family violence services. There are very few existing, valid and reliable measurement tools suitable for women and child victim-survivors of family violence, and this project necessitated thoughtful experimentation and innovation.
The evaluation team took a transformative and co-design approach to evaluating the program. There were several considerations in measuring social impact in a way which privileged and respected: trauma experience of participants, children as victim-survivors in their own right, and diverse participants, including Indigenous peoples.
The Research team prioritised decolonising the evaluation approach, balancing evaluation rigour with flexibility and promotion of social inclusion, social justice and sustainability in programming and evaluation, genuine collaboration and consultation, promoting cultural safety and lived experience perspectives and diversity of data sources.
Runner up
For-Purpose Evaluations & Fams | Amplify Our Sector
Fams is the NSW peak body that represents the child protection NGO early intervention and prevention sector. The Amplify Project is a partnership between Fams and For-Purpose Evaluations (FPE) alongside twelve NGOs providing Targeted Early Intervention (TEI) programs from around NSW. Amplify supports a shift from a culture of compliance to a culture of outcomes curiosity across the TEI sector.
Amplify provides free and accessible resources to support organisations to understand their outcomes data, celebrate excellence, identify areas for improvement and communicate their findings. Over nine months Fams and FPE developed the Amplify Toolkit. The Amplify Toolkit is available to download for free on the Fams website and includes: a guide to understanding and communicating outcomes, a worksheet and a Power Point template for organisations to use to create the own Impact Reports.
Participating organisations received individual coaching to apply the Amplify Toolkit, analyse their data and develop their Impact Reports. They presented their Impact Reports at a Showcase Event attended by Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ), other TEI providers, Fams, and FPE. Amplify 2.0 will scale the impact of the original project across the TEI sector, fostering a self-sustaining community of practice among TEI providers across NSW.
Winner:
Relationships Australia Victoria | Demonstrating the impact and value of our services (family dispute resolution)
Over several years Relationships Australia Victoria has been on a journey to articulate, document and evidence program logics, an organisational theory of change, and outcome measurement framework. Their inaugural Social Impact Report was launched in 2023 (socialimpact.rav.org.au) with a theory of change animation and examples of impact across five key outcome domains. Their theory of change demonstrates how the organisation delivers positive outcomes and improved wellbeing for individuals, families and communities by building the skills, knowledge and attitudes that form the foundation of healthy relationships. As a result of ongoing efforts to embed routine outcome measurement into practice, this year in their Social Impact Report 2024 they have been able to report on high quality paired client-assessed data before and after service delivery, across 4 outcome domains, for a wide range of services.
Clients’ self-assessment of change indicate significant improvements in subjective wellbeing across all these domains. They have been able to use this data, combined with research and practice evidence to conduct a rigorous cost benefit analysis of their family dispute resolution services using wellbeing valuation. This analysis has shown that in addition to being cost-effective for government, families benefit most significantly through increased financial wellbeing and improved outcomes.
Runner up:
ANZ | Saver Plus
Established by ANZ and Brotherhood of St Laurence (BSL) in 2003, Saver Plus is the world’s largest and longest running matched savings and financial education program. The program helps lower income Australians establish a long-term savings habit by combining incentives, personal support and goal setting.
Since 2003, Australian Government, ANZ, BSL and program partners The Smith Family and Berry Street have commissioned independent research to evaluate the impact of Saver Plus, producing twenty public reports. In October 2024 a longitudinal impact report of Saver Plus was launched, conducted in partnership with ANZ, BSL’s Social Policy and Research Centre (SPARC) and University of Tasmania.
The research involved an online survey to over 26,000 past participants, in-depth interviews with 25 participants, analysis of program data to gain further insights and calculation of social return on investment.
Thank you
Each year, the SIMNA Awards are made possible thanks to the generosity of our incredible supporters and partners. The 2024 SIMNA Awards are supported by the Australian Government Department of Social Services and our award sponsors, Clear Horizon, SmartyGrants, SVA Consulting, and Urbis’ Social and Economic Advisory Unit.
Thank you to our esteemed judging panel for their time and expertise in assessing all of this’s applications and determining our finalists, runners up and winners.