Spice is a social enterprise that has developed a unique time-based printed currency called Time Credits. They work across health and social care, housing, community development and education, supporting organisations and services to use Time Credits to achieve their outcomes. So far almost 30,000 people have earned Time Credits, and approximately 450,000 Time Credits have been issued across England and Wales.
What CSAIF funded:
Spice were given £343,972 to expand their model in London, Lancashire and the East of England. View the full impact evaluation.
Level on Standards: Level 1 - You can describe what you do and why it matters, logically, coherently and convincingly.
Aim: Through its evaluation, Spice intends to measure the local and national impact of Time Credits on individuals and communities.
Evaluator: Apteligen
Key findings: The findings highlighted three key areas of impact: quality of life, health and wellbeing; building stronger communities and building individual capacity, creating new opportunities.
Methodology: An annual survey was distributed to Time Credits participants between April and May 2015. Some results were compared to a previous annual evaluation survey distributed between July 2012 and December 2014. All members participating in the Time Credits scheme were surveyed - 439 individuals completed the questionnaire.
Why this Level: Spice have delivered an evaluation that seemingly suggests change over time for the individuals that it supports. The report is clearly written, with some good retrospective and interview based data. However, there are some key areas for improvement Spice will need to address to be considered for validation at Level 2.
These include:
Progress: We have reviewed our approach to measuring impact and will be, over time, implementing a revised approach to evaluation taking on many of these recommendations. In particular we are:
Lessons learned: We have come on a significant journey over the past few years on understanding the direct and indirect impacts of Time Credits on individuals, organisations and communities. We gained enormous knowledge in the process and this now will enable us to focus on areas of weakness particularly around specific attribution and what methods work well in our very diverse programmes across health, care, community development and housing.
Next steps: We will be reviewing and writing a new evaluation plan for Spice taking on this learning. This plan will address both the methodological aspects that require focus but also how we can continue to understand our impact in the many contexts we work and how we can work with and use the expertise of our partners in this process. Future planning will take into account the dual needs we have to understand our broad impact across all our work and also the specific impacts we have in particular contexts and settings. We will also be examining how we use data from our programmes to support and explain our understanding of impact.