Q2 monitoring

Meeting this afternoon in the Welcome Centre with Andrew Tovell, who is responsible for monitoring our performance against the requirements of our contract with Leicester City Council.

There are two aspects to this contract: one, the delivery of what's called our "Core Service"; the other, responsibilities as what's called a "Host Organisation". Without going into detail, the former could be described as our inward-facing work (the day-to-day co-ordination of the functioning of the Council of Faiths), while the latter could be described as our outward-facing work (the relationship between the Council of Faiths and the wider community).

I'm still surprised at how much refining, how much fine tuning these reports require. You'd think it would be a simple matter to say what we did and when we did it. But to be effective, our reports have to be more nuanced than that.

Second quarter is often harder to survey effectively. It coincideswith school holidays, there's often a drop in activities because people are away. In our case, several of the activities to which we devoted our energy - such as the demonstration by the English Defence League, the celebration of Leicester Speaks (AKA Local Democracy Week) - happened in October, which is in the third quarter. So our report shows a lot of preparation that paid off in the next monitoring period.

We need to focus on outcomes, rather than just show that we've been busy. For the uninitiated (and I still count myself as being in that category for the most part), the difference between "inputs", "outputs" and "outcomes" has been explained to me thus:

input: you arrange a meeting, say, to discuss a dispute over responsibility for keeping clean a communal alleyway that runs between two different faith community centres;

output: people from the interested parties attended the meeting;

outcome: an agreement was made between the two community groups, resolving the dispute.

It's better for us to concentrate on a few central matters, than to provide a list of what we've done and when. We need to show the benefit of our involvement in these activities for the people of Leicester - not their benefit for the Council of Faiths.