Five rounds of partner reports from 47 organisations, in one public evidence portal

The Social Employment Fund pays civil society organisations and social enterprises to create part-time work in food security, education, health, the environment, community safety and other areas. Each implementing partner reported quarterly and at close-out, in its own format, with its own themes and its own indicators.

Two partners could count the same thing under different names. The same name could mean two different measurements. Activities, outputs and outcomes sat in the same tables. Nobody could add a result up across the fund and say where the total came from.

We started with an audit of what had been reported and how. Every report was then logged in a source register before anything was extracted from it.

Extraction ran against fixed schemas for themes, indicators and results, with AI doing the first pass and people reviewing the output. Partner wording was kept at source level. Programme-wide themes and indicators were built above it, so a consolidated indicator still points to the partner, report, page and passage it came from.

Totals on the portal add only results that measure the same thing in the same unit. Where a figure counts something different, such as participant allocation records, it is shown on its own and never added to the rest.

We then built a theory of change library for each partner and each funding round, and linked it to the same themes and indicators. Each new reporting round now goes through the same route.

1. 294 source documents→
2. 9,288 evidence data points→
3. 209 universal indicators, 13 themes→
4. 1 public portal