Maldon & District

Bureau Briefing 2007

Measured Success

This Bureau has a vibrant workforce unpaid, volunteer advisers who undergo rigorous training to become accredited advisers with a thorough professional approach. Some of them bring a wide range of experience from their previous working lives, others use the training and work to help them into paid employment, and some have become advisers after being helped themselves with a problem by the CAB.

Until now the Bureau has tended to assess performance on its "outputs" e.g. how many people seed, how many enquiries handled and its ability to provide services within the allocated budget. Best value and other government initiatives are placing greater emphasis on measuring the outcomes as well as the cost effectiveness of projects and organizations. With the move to Commissioning, rather than funding through the provision of grants, Councils and other public bodies are increasingly required to know what differences the interventions that they fund are making as part of their own accountability tests.
As a result there is an increasing need for the Bureau in line with other voluntary organizations to examine the outcomes of their work as a key element of good management practice. Identifying and agreeing relevant outcomes can add significantly to clarity of purpose and also to a shared understanding of that purpose. We have started that process and the revised list of categories is shown in the table. In this last year Maldon and District Citizens Advice Bureau helped local people solve over 10,000 problems and brought £200,000 into the District by helping people get the money they are entitled to. The charity also dealt with £3.3M worth of debt, saved 12 families form loosing their Homes and supported dozens of people who had been dismissed or unfairly treated by their employers. We invite all service users and partners to help us develop the measurement of our achievements - now “outcomes”!