MENd Together CIC: turning meaningful work into evidence

At a glance

Organisation

MENd Together CIC, a community interest company supporting men through peer support.

Sector

Men's mental health, peer support and community wellbeing.

What this is

An early implementation account. It describes how the platform is being set up and used, not outcomes achieved.

The organisation and its work

MENd Together CIC works with men who are struggling, often quietly and often for a long time before they walk through a door. The approach is peer support: groups, conversation, shared activity, and the slow business of building trust between people who have been through similar things.

Delivery is relational rather than transactional. A session is not a service being dispensed. It is a room where somebody speaks for the first time in months, or comes back a second week having said nothing the first. The value of the work sits in moments like these, and those moments rarely arrive in a form that fits a monitoring spreadsheet.

The organisation is also accountable, like any other. It has a board, partners, potential funders and a community it answers to. All of them reasonably want to understand what the work does, and all of them are used to being handed numbers that do not tell them very much.

The challenge: meaningful work, fragmented evidence

The evidence of that work exists. It is just scattered. Attendance is noted in one place, a facilitator's observation in another, a piece of feedback in a message thread, a photograph on somebody's phone. Each fragment is real. None of them, on its own, answers the question the organisation is asked.

A single positive quote may be valuable, but it cannot establish that an entire programme is effective. Equally, attendance figures alone cannot explain whether men are experiencing meaningful change.

That leaves a familiar gap. Reporting time arrives, and the strongest things that happened are the hardest to retrieve, because nobody recorded them at the moment they happened. What gets reported is what was easy to count.

How MENd Together uses ImpactProof

Setting up the organisation

Setup begins with the organisation itself rather than a template: what MENd Together believes about how change happens for the men it works with, how it works, and what it is trying to achieve. That description is intended to sit underneath everything else, so later reports are shaped by the organisation's own account of its work rather than by whichever form arrived most recently.

Programmes, cohorts and participant journeys

Programmes are set up as they actually run, with cohorts and groups reflecting real delivery. The platform is designed to follow a participant's journey over time, so a man who attends across several months is understood as one continuing story rather than a series of unconnected attendance ticks.

Recording a session

Session recording is intended to take a couple of minutes and to be done by whoever was in the room. Who came, what was delivered, what was noticed, anything a participant said that mattered. The point is that a facilitator can capture something meaningful without stopping to think about evaluation categories.

Capturing the evidence behind the work

Everything recorded stays attached to the moment it came from. A quote keeps its session, its date and its context. An observation keeps the person who made it. A change noted in someone's circumstances keeps a link back to the delivery around it.

That traceability is the whole point. A statement in a report is only as good as the records beneath it, and the follow-up question, where did that come from, should have an answer that takes seconds rather than an afternoon of searching.

• Recorded at the point of delivery, not reconstructed later under deadline pressure.
• Each record keeps its date, its context and its source.
• Sensitive information is handled with care, and detail is only captured where it is appropriate to hold it.

Understanding the strength of the evidence

Not all evidence carries the same weight, and a system that pretends otherwise is worse than no system. ImpactProof is designed to distinguish between different kinds of record and to be plain about how much they support.

A single positive feedback record should not produce a claim of complete evidence strength. Where information is sparse, the system should clearly indicate that there is not yet enough evidence to support a confident conclusion.

For MENd Together, that means an honest picture from the start: some outcomes will be well supported, others will be thin, and the difference should be visible rather than smoothed over.

One place to see what's happening, not a maze of dashboards

ImpactProof brings the organisation-wide picture and the day-to-day task list into a single dashboard, rather than splitting them across separate destinations that all claim to tell staff what to do. For MENd Together, that means one place shows programme health, evidence gaps and emerging patterns, alongside the specific actions and follow-ups that need attention this week. The aim is one home screen, not several competing for attention.

Reporting without rebuilding the evidence every time

Reporting is meant to draw on what is already there. Rather than starting a document from nothing, the organisation works from the evidence it has already recorded, and each figure or statement keeps its link back to the records beneath it.

The aim isn't to generate a polished impact story from nothing. It's to help structure and communicate the story the organisation's actual evidence can support, including the places where that evidence stops short.

What's next, not part of the pilot yet

Connecting evidence directly to funding applications, so a funder can see exactly what an organisation has already proven, is part of where ImpactProof is heading. It isn't part of what MENd Together is using during this pilot. We'd rather build that properly, with organisations who've already got their evidence base solid, than rush it.

Theory of change and framework alignment

MENd Together's own account of how change happens sits at the centre of its setup, and the evidence collected is intended to attach to that account rather than to a generic category list. If you want the underlying structure, our theory of change template is the same one we work through with organisations.

Outside frameworks then map onto that picture. A grant form, a contract specification or a board template each gets its categories filled from the same underlying evidence, for that particular reader, while the organisation's own version stays intact underneath.

The human benefit

A facilitator should be able to record meaningful information without having to become an evaluation specialist. The person best placed to notice that something shifted for a man in the room is the person sitting in the room, and the recording should be simple enough that noticing is the hard part, not writing it down.

A participant's experience should not disappear into a score, and a score should never be treated as more important than the evidence beneath it.

What success would look like

These are things to be tested during the pilot, not things that have been established.

• Facilitators record sessions consistently, because it takes minutes rather than being another chore.
• The organisation can see where its evidence is strong and where it is thin, without being told a comforting number.
• A report can be produced without a fortnight of reconstruction, and every claim in it can be traced.
• The men supported by the work are represented as people, not as rows.

If any of these does not hold up in practice, that is a finding about the platform, and it is exactly what the pilot exists to surface.

In closing

ImpactProof is being developed to help MENd Together turn everyday delivery into a connected, credible and useful evidence base. The goal is not to make the organisation's impact appear stronger than it is. It is to make the evidence behind its work clearer, more accessible and more useful, so that meaningful work can be understood and trusted.