Ontario Evaluation Platform for Settlement Agencies
Project Overview
OCASI specializes in developing the capacity of member agencies and providing a voice for the sector at the local, provincial and national levels. Member agencies and the Board of Directors have identified a priority need for OCASI to provide evaluation resources. The evaluation resources would support OCASI members to improve program effectiveness (including cost-effectiveness) and demonstrate accountability for resource investments.
This need will be fulfilled through the Service Information System or Système d'Information de Service (SIS), a new initiative funded by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration (MCI). It is spear-headed by OCASI and developed in partnership with LogicalOutcomes, a Canadian non-profit organization. The project is to be carried out from February 2017 to March 2018.
Top Five Benefits of SIS
Use of SIS will reduce the costs of monitoring and evaluation activities, increase their usefulness, and result in improved program efficacy for communities in Ontario. SIS will help agencies to:
- Standardize indicators
- Facilitate data collection
- Simplify analysis and reporting
- Communicate with funders and the community
- Demonstrate achievement
1) Standardize indicators
SIS will provide a common set of indicators that OCASI member agencies have requested, plus indicators that Ontario Non-profit funders have defined. No more scrambling to find the appropriate indicators or research a funder’s requirements.
2) Facilitate data collection
SIS will provide data collection tools and surveys so that agencies can collect data from their clients and staff.
Collect data from clients via online surveys, telephone surveys, paper forms or mobile apps that can be analyzed and reported in near-to-real-time, to show progress.
3) Simplify analysis and reporting
With all your data in one place, and powerful visualization tools, analyzing program reach and impact will be easier, and reporting simpler.
4) Communicate with funders and the community
Design community dashboards based on public data to demonstrate the needs that the organization is responding to. Use this for grant applications and stakeholder communications.
5) Demonstrate achievement
Demonstrate the achievement of program quality standards through self-assessment organizational tools such as OrgWise.
The Evaluation Platform: Service Information System (SIS)
The evaluation platform is expected to improve the effectiveness of services provided to immigrants and refugees and dramatically reduce the costs and data collection burden of monitoring and evaluation across the sector.
The evaluation platform will provide a bank of standard indicators, ready-to-use data collection instruments, a secure data warehouse, and data visualization tools to SPOs across Ontario and possibly Canada. It will incude:
- A bank of validated indicators that agencies can select based on the desired outcomes of their programs (e.g., number of participants who got full-time employment, defined as 30 hours a week or more, broken down by age and sex).
- Survey templates with pre-populated collections of questions for topics like demographics (Race, Gender, Age, (Dis)ability, Sexuality), health, finances, satisfaction and so on.
- Administrative data measures to track program performance, such as numbers served, project milestones and other outputs.
- A secure data warehouse, protected by multiple layers of encryption and authentication, to protect client confidentiality.
- A powerful data visualization and reporting engine, including unlimited dashboards that can be public or private.
- A public information portal that shows community reports on household income and employment broken down by immigration status and education based on Statistics Canada data.
This webpage will be updated on a regular basis as the project develops.
The Partners
OCASI was formed in 1978 to act as a collective voice for immigrant-serving agencies and to coordinate responses to shared needs and concerns. OCASI is a registered charity governed by a volunteer board of directors. Its membership is comprised of more than 225 community-based organizations in Ontario.
LogicalOutcomes, is a Canadian Not-for-Profit organization with a mission to promote collective impact through shared measurement systems. Over the past two years it has successfully implemented six evaluation systems built on District Health Information Software (DHIS2), which is the software platform that will form the basis of SIS.ngo. All DHIS2 projects included software implementation, user training, facilitated workshops and sustainability planning.