Canadian Government Executive - Volume 23 - Issue 03

8 / Canadian Government Executive // March/April 2017 Program Evaluation Grounded: A s ‘month 13’ for Canada’s Syrian refugee arrivals comes and goes, and the year of government sup- port comes to an end, what in- formation will the Canadian government have to make evidence-based decisions to help move their lives forward? Or, as the homeless population ages, what intelligence will assist the govern- ment to develop the supports these folks need? How will it serve people like Dustin, age 55, on and off the streets since he was 10, with keys to a house, but often prefer- ring to sleep rough with friends? Grounded: A real-time feedback loop Grounded is a data service connecting policy makers and organizational leaders with the people using and experiencing services. By logging into the Grounded Gathering Robust Intelligence for the Digital Age of Policymaking Sarah Schulman Daniela Kraemer Jonas Piet Natalie Napier website, decision makers find aggregated qualitative data of individuals’ daily expe- riences, including ratings of services and perceived barriers and enablers. The data can be used to inform policy briefs, better target procurement, and im- prove training and professional develop- ment for service delivery staff. Grounded adds another level of intelli- gence to the social policy toolkit. The inspiration: Shadowing street-involved adults on service visits The idea for Grounded comes from six- months shadowing over 50 street-involved adults in downtown Toronto, and beta- testing the data service with municipal, provincial, and federal policy makers. In 2015-2016 InWithForward (IWF), a so- cial service design agency, partnered with Toronto’s West Neighbourhood House (West NH) to develop new social supports for street-involved adults. When IWF re- searchers started shadowing drop-in cen- tre users as they engaged with housing, health, justice, employment, and other so- cial services, stories surfaced that offered a human understanding of policy imple- mentation gaps. For example: Frank, an avid reader in his 50s who is interested in black holes and theoretical physics. Frank has been living on the streets for over 20 years. When Frank decided 2016 was the year he would get housing, an IWF researcher ac- companied him to a housing office. What we learned was surprising – not only was Frank ineligible to receive housing sup- port (he had not filed taxes in years, a prerequisite), but the housing worker was using Craigslist – a public website Frank could easily use himself. Frank was frus- trated and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking. No ongoing information pipeline from the streets to decision-makers To help us develop our Grounded proto- type, we tested it with 60 civil servants in Toronto and Ottawa. More than 40 agreed with the statement: “too many policy mak- ers feel removed from the people on-the ground, and lack a feedback loop of how policies and programs are playing out.” Civil servants told us they would like to be better connected to the beneficiaries of their services. They want to make stronger evidenced-based decisions when working to resolve social problems. Chief executives and senior level direc- tors of six large service delivery organiza- tions also lamented that in their organiza- tions data is perceived as a performance management tool, rather than as a learn- ing tool. They told us that they wish to cre- ate internal systems and routines to more rigorously listen to service users, to help them tweak programs based on user feed- back. Lastly, the folks whose lives we are working to change, people like Dustin and Frank, say that they lack an avenue to in- put their stories; a way to provide real on- the-ground intelligence that could enable responsive action. What’s the problem Grounded is trying to solve? Many policymakers and organizational leaders in the social policy space have no choice but to make some decisions blind. There is a dearth of real-time data to help learn about the issues facing certain popu- lation groups, and identify where and how to best intervene. Grounded addresses three major limita- tions with the existing data supply: a. The quality of quantitative data from the social service sector is often poor The quality of existing quantitative data in the social service sector is rife with inaccuracies, stemming from human er- ror, norming biases, data collectors who need to achieve preset targets, and a lack of rigour. Our work at several drop-in cen- tres revealed a range of reliability and validity errors with officially reported sta- tistics. Because funding is often linked to outputs like service usage, organizations are incentivized to report high volumes. Staff tend to perceive data collection as an accountability tool versus a practice im- provement tool. b. Outliers are missing from existing datasets
 Outliers like Dustin are often left out of census data and other representative sam- ples. They can be hard to track down, and their data is often removed from samples so as not to skew results. Without an ex- plicit strategy to go after outliers, new policies and interventions are unlikely to work for the groups with the highest