WHERE
Social Enterprise Works was established in 1993 to provide business advice to Social Enterprise’ and promote the development of the sector in the West of England, UK. Social Enterprise Works is a membership organisation and currently has 296 subscribed members; the majority are local social enterprises. The organisation has 9 employees (7.5 FTE), 4 core posts (Director, Finance, Marketing and Admin), 4 Social Enterprise Advisors (2 x general, 2 x Performance Improvement) and a Credit Union Project Officer.
Benchmarking is an efficient way to learn from others and improve own organisation
The key service is supporting social enterprise start-up including pro-bono legal advice to enable groups to incorporate. More recently the organisation has introduced a wider range of services for established organisations including consultancy and Performance Improvement advice as a partner in the C3 partnership.
WHY
In October 2005 Social Enterprise Works self assessed their performance against the EFQM Business Excellence Model. The assessment identified that the organisation was not collecting enough information from its customers about its services and that the current client management processes were not supportive of the desired proactive relationship that the organisation wanted to achieve for its customers.
HOW
Social Enterprise Works decided that it would be helpful to find out how other organisations were using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to build and maintain relationships with their customers. It was decided that benchmarking could provide useful information and learning. To this end Social Enterprise Works applied and were selected to be part of a national benchmarking project.
Benchmarking is a self-improvement tool for organisations. It allows them to compare themselves with others, to identify their comparative strengths and weaknesses and learn how to improve. Benchmarking is a way of finding and adopting best practices.
If you prefer diagrams to words…
Adapted from: TQMI Training for Continuous Improvement ‘Successful Benchmarking’ Guide, taken from How to do Benchmarking - A practitioners guide, written by Jane Foot.
Benchmarking – basic steps:
- Deciding on the areas you want to compare and improve
- Choosing how to compare your performance and practice
- Choosing who you want to measure yourself against
- Gathering the comparative information
- Analysing and presenting the information
- Deciding how to use this information to improve your performance
- Managing the process
1. Deciding on the areas you want to compare and improve
There are a number of ways that an organisation might identify an area that they wish to improve, perhaps as a result of a self assessment, a strategic review, an existing business plan or a sector-wide survey.
At Social Enterprise Works we had already identified that we wanted to improve our client management system after a self assessment process using the EFQM Business Excellence Model.
2. Choosing how to compare your performance and practice
Initially it will be important to decide the best approach dependent on the type of information you want to collect and how you are going to collect it:
Internal
You choose to compare performance within your own organisation, for example, absence rates within sections or branches, costs of meetings.
External
You find up to five organisations to compare your performance or practice, for example, the efficiency of a finance department or success at fundraising – you can form a club or make visits to particular organisations.
Sector-wide or comparison with other sectors
You can join a benchmarking survey that compares around 100 organisations in terms of IT, HR or fundraising functions. This can be within the voluntary and community sector or comparisons with the private or public sector.
At Social Enterprise Works we worked together as a team to write a set of questions about each stage of the process we wanted to improve, for example how clients were dealt with from the first point of contact, to how often clients were contacted in a year. Some of the information required was quantitative but the majority was qualitative and so a decision was made to conduct face-to-face interviews rather than sending out questionnaires. We also decided that external partners were most appropriate for our needs.
Tips for writing questions:
- Define what you want to know in as much detail as you can. Time spent now being as clear as possible is time well spent.
- Be aware that terms may be used differently in other organisations.
- Make sure you are consistent with all the benchmarking partners.
- Don’t rely on one source of information, be prepared that not everyone will return the questionnaire
- Present information in a way that can be shared at a later date
- Test a questionnaire to make sure respondents understand what you are asking
- Show benchmarking partners the questions first and be open to any suggestions
- Try questions out first on a colleague or local organisation
3. Choosing who you want to measure yourself against
Once you have decided on your approach and what you want to measure you need to find people and organisations to benchmark with – whether this is internal staff, other organisations, clubs or sector-wide surveys.
At Social Enterprise Works first we identified similar business advice organisations that we considered might have a similar client process to us. We contacted each one to find out whether a) their client processes were similar to ours b) whether they would be interested in sharing information about their practice with us. Nearly all agreed to be our benchmarking partners. We decided on five partners, two very similar to us in size and turnover, one a lot smaller and two larger.
4. Gathering the comparative information
There are different ways of gathering information and they all have pros and cons. Here are five options:
- Visiting benchmarking partners – this can be time-consuming and expensive but provide a rich source of information – ideally take a colleague with you
- Taking part in a sector-wide survey – this can be expensive and take time to find out all the answers but provides useful comparative data
- Sending questionnaires to partners – this is a cheaper way of getting answers from a number of partners but may lack some of the detail of visits – you could combine this with visits to get maximum information
- Telephone interviews – this should overcome any misinterpretation of questionnaires sent by email or post. This is a middle option between visits and sending questionnaires.
- Hosting a web survey – web companies can set up a survey for you and then you send the link to your networks asking people to fill it in online
At Social Enterprise Works we decided that face-to-face interviews were most appropriate and as most of the organisations that agreed to be partners were located locally the cost implication was low. However, one organisation was based in London, 120 miles from the office, so the cost and time implications increased dramatically.
Checklist for a benchmarking visit
- Prepare thoroughly by reviewing all you know about the partner before the visit
- Clearly define aims and objectives
- Agree in advance an agenda for the visit and issues to be discussed
- Agree any specific activities, such as comparing process maps, or anything that might need planning, such as attendance at training
- Familiarise yourself with the questionnaire, if you are using one
- Look at the partner’s website beforehand
- Ask for any useful supporting material
- Write down key points at a convenient time, check this is OK with partner
- Provide any information required by the partner
- Be willing to arrange a reciprocal visit
- Check your notes as soon as possible after the visit
- Allow enough space to fill in answers
The partner may not operate in all respects in ways that can be compared. The important issue is how far good practice can be transferred, rather than how far there is absolute comparability.
5. Analysing and presenting the information
Evidence well presented can be very powerful. Use graphs, tables, flow charts etc to present the information in the most compelling and succinct way. You may want to show the same information in two different ways, for example as a pie chart and in figures.
The table below is an example of how an organisation that wanted to compare the impact of career development with two other organisations presented the results. It is an example of how it is possible to present a combination of qualitative and quantitative results in one table.
8. Deciding how to use this information to improve your performance
Use what you have learned from benchmarking to contribute to your thinking on:
- Goals or targets
- Designing new approaches
- Developing proposals
- Implementation e.g. staging, timescales
Ensure that your proposals are right for your organisation – culture, people, leadership, identity etc.
Make a list of the learning points you have gained from the experience
Use benchmarking as a way of developing relationships with partners beyond the project.
At Social Enterprise Works we used the information to improve a number of our client management processes including asking clients where they found out about us and, contacting clients if they haven’t contacted us in 6 months to find out how they are getting on. We also received recommendations about suitable customer management software; we intend to try it out in the near future. We also found that organisations that had implemented the quality standard Customer First UK had far more robust processes for collecting information from their clients.
9. Managing the process
Here are some top tips from people who have conducted benchmarking:
- Involve staff from the beginning and keep them informed throughout
- Think about setting up a group of staff, volunteers etc to oversee the project
- Make sure the benchmarking is seen as a learning experience, not a threat
- Delegate – the best results may be achieved by the person who will be most affected by the changes
- Think of finding benchmarking partners as building relationships
- Once you’ve established benchmarking in your organisation, it could be a quicker process in future years
- Allow about ten working days to conduct an average benchmarking exercise and plan for the process to take 4-5 months
- Build a timetable for the work required, so there are deadlines to meet – these could be reporting to staff meetings or benchmarking partners – it keeps up the momentum
Experiences
Social Enterprise Works were chosen to be part of a national benchmarking project that was organised by the Performance Improvement Hub. The aim of the project was to support a range of not-for-profit organisations conduct a benchmarking exercise and to capture the learning in order to develop a set of guidelines that will be publicly available. The organisations involved in the project ranged from a small voluntary organisation with one employee to a large infrastructure organisation with over 50 employees. Initially I was concerned that they wouldn’t participate because of the time implications, but that wasn’t the case. When I asked an organisation to participate I said that they would receive a copy of the report and I think this motivated them, all they had to do was answer a set of 30 questions and in return get a report that allowed them to compare and learn from six organisations (quite a good deal really). All of the organisations reported that they had a very positive learning experience with good ideas for improvements that many implemented.
Lessons Learnt
At Social Enterprise Works we found that benchmarking was a useful way to identify ways to improve an identified area for improvement. However, the process was time consuming and took over 4 months to complete. In hindsight we would have reduced the number of questions we asked. We had written 35 detailed questions and this produced a large amount of information that had to be presented in a way that was easy to read. Next time we would spend more time developing the questions to make them more focused and reduce the number.
We decided to visit each organisation to ask the questions in a face-to-face interview. Although this was time consuming, we believe that the additional information we picked up about the organisation while we were there was very valuable for example, in depth information about their products and services and the history of the organisations development.
Transferability
Benchmarking is already used by many organisations in the commercial and public sector but is currently not used as much in the not-for-profit sector. However, there is a growing interest in benchmarking from the sector in the UK The Performance Improvement Hub will be publishing guidelines to help organisations in the sector use benchmarking in Spring 2007. Social Enterprise Works will also be launching a benchmarking service for the social enterprise sector in Summer 2007.
For more information:
Please contact Julie Ellison at Social Enterprise Works: julie-at-socialenterpriseworks.org
www.socialenterpriseworks.org