The Client
Contact support families with disabled children by offering guidance and advice, influencing policy and campaigns and offering training for practitioners.
The Client's Problem
Contact wanted a better view of the demographics of the people they reach as a charity, to highlight gaps in services and to inform future activities and analysis. The outputs had to be understandable to non-analysts and reproducible in future years.
The Solution
The solution was a report and presentation to their race & equality group, which answered the questions:
- Who are Contact reaching, what are their demographics and how does it compare with the population?
- Are there differences in service access for each of the demographic groups?
- Is there any further data that would be useful to collect, or analysis that would capture a greater insight on service use and reach?
Time constraints meant only gender and ethnicity were focussed on, however further research would have allowed child age and condition to be investigated. These would enable Contact to see whether their services were accessible and ensure that they weren’t missing key areas of the population. The report will be used for future programme planning.
The Benefits
Contact can now see the demographics of users of their services, which can be fairly different to the population. It has already posed policy questions about whether men are underrepresented when using Contact services, as well as certain ethnic groups in specific locations.
There are a number of further research questions to look into around why certain people use the services they do. I will be presenting my findings to their internal race & equality group in a few weeks where I will be able to highlight the key findings and suggest further areas of research.
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