Our report launched today, Feelings count, shares early findings from two of the charities testing our new well-being questionnaire. The questionnaire aims to help organisations working with children measure their impact on children’s subjective well-being.
The aim of many children’s charities is to increase the happiness of the children they work with. This might be through boosting self-esteem or helping to them to build better relationships with friends and family.
Yet many charities working to improve children’s well-being say that it is impossible to put a number on the work they do.
At NPC we say that while it may seem strange to try and put a number on a feeling, it is certainly not impossible. And we argue that children’s charities should not shy away from measuring their impact just because it is challenging.
NPC wants to challenge charities to achieve impressive results and to raise their accountability to funders and to themselves. We believe that charities need to work harder to measure their impact. Only in this way can funding be channelled to the most successful interventions and away from ineffective or even damaging interventions.
Which is why we have developed this questionnaire so that charities will have the right tools at their fingertips to do this. The questionnaire is designed to evaluate the impact of services on seven aspects of 11 to 16 year old children’s subjective well-being, including self-esteem, resilience and relationships with friends and family. The report Feelings Count reports the early findings from two of the five charities piloting the questionnaire, and proves its potential as a highly useful tool for charities, funders and schools.
NPC plan to continue refining the questionnaire before launching it online in October 2009. It will be freely available for registered charities to download and we hope many children’s charities will jump at the opportunity to finally articulate their full impact in a way never possible before. We welcome your comments and suggestions on any aspect of the well-being project.
