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Benefits Tool

The Tool

Produce a quick benefits footprint for your project to help to communicate the importance of your project to key stakeholders and assist you in prioritising projects to commission and decommission.

In 2010 the City of London Delivery Innovation Team undertook a research project to identify the key benefits and beneficiaries of social innovation projects, which use technology.

A research report was produced presenting a benefits-beneficiary framework common to the hundreds of projects it was validated against.

A simple tool has been produced which enables the quick and easy development of ‘footprint’ diagrams for a project based on the benefits-beneficiary framework. These ‘Benefit Footprints’ help to scope out, very quickly, the primary areas of benefit and where these benefits fall for a given idea or project. They can then be presented to key stakeholders to begin to communicate the potential importance of an idea.

The tool is designed to help produce a footprint in less than 30mins – and these effectively represent the earliest form of business case for your innovation.

 

Case Study:

The challenge of clearly expressing the benefits of a project or innovation in a convincing and holistic way is often at the heart of gaining approval and buy-in to commencement or continuation. The primary objective of this benefits-beneficiary research is to address this challenge by supporting project teams in strengthening their case for a new project, or for continuation and diffusion of an existing one. Put simply, the key objective is to help project teams make more explicit Who Benefits? and How they Benefit? from the socially inclusive use of technology. In meeting this objective the following have been developed:

  • A high level reference framework of benefits and beneficiaries for projects.
  • A high level analysis of the types of benefit and beneficiary emerging from over 500 social inclusion projects.
  • Checklists of typical benefits and beneficiaries.
  • A tool for easy access to the checklists that enables quick development of benefit-beneficiary tables for projects

 These outputs can be used to help to:

  • Justify more systemic and strategic consideration of technology enabled social inclusion projects by councils and local partnerships.
  • Develop business cases for new initiatives and justify continuation of existing projects.
  • Conduct more robust evaluations of projects.
  • Develop benefits realisations plans for projects

 

Measures of Success:

The benefits-beneficiary framework has been embedded in solutions4inclusion and mapped against around 1000 projects.

The tool has also been embedded in the social and economic business case tool which has helped to develop business cases for social and community based projects and innovations.

The framework has also been embedded in the Local Service Innovation Toolkit to help people to quickly and simply create the earliest form of business case for a selection of ideas emerging from an innovation process.


You can read more on the Benefits Framework here, or you can view the tool here.