Benchmarking
Benchmarking is a useful tool to help an organisation with the improvement process. Once an organisation has identified an area that needs improving, benchmarking can be used to find out if other organisations have developed innovative approaches that may be useful when planning your improvement process. Often organisations have tried and tested new products and services, or implemented new ways of doing things and can provide valuable insights and information before you start.
How to benchmark with partners
Once you have decided on an area you want to improve, spend a bit of time identifying key issues that you need to know or understand before you can make improvement. For example: if you had identified that you want to improve customer relationship management, you might want to consider the client process including first point of contact, client feedback and evaluation, plus methods for marketing and communications.After you have carried out this analysis, the next step is to draw up a set of questions that will provide the information to understand how another organisation carries out these stages/processes. E.g. “How do clients initially make contact?” We recommend you prepare a short set of no more than 20 questions.The next step is to identify other organisations to be your benchmarking partners. We recommend around 5 partners but there are examples of successful benchmarking with just 1 partner. Benchmarking partners do not have to be similar to your organisation, e.g. a volunteer centre partnered with a police unit.Once your partners have been identified, you can either send them your questions or carry out face-to-face interviews. Once you have collected all your results, you can produce a non-attributed report. Send the report to your partners. By doing this, you all gain something from the process.Social Enterprise Works has developed a new on-line ‘BenchLearning Service’. This will enable third sector organisations to anonymously compare approaches, processes and results with other organisations, using questionnaires covering 3 different areas:
- Key Performance Results
- People Management
- Financial Management
A performance diagnostic tool- BenchLearning Perform- is also available. This is based on C3Perform and has been developed to help an organisation identify which of the questionnaires are most appropriate for their improvement needs. For more information or guidance on the BenchLearning Service, go to: www.socialenterpriseworks.org/benchmarking/