FROM EARLY EVIDENCE TO STRONGER OUTCOMES

What is the Community Coach initiative trying to achieve?

The Discovery Coast, including Agnes Water, the Town of 1770 and Miriam Vale, is a small, dispersed rural and coastal community. Long distances to services, limited access to non-clinical mental health support and social isolation can leave people turning to their GP because they are lonely, socially isolated, struggling with their mental health or simply finding everyday life difficult. Medical treatment is not necessarily the whole answer.

The Community Coach provides trauma-informed, one-to-one wellbeing support through personalised planning, health literacy, self-care strategies and supported introductions to local groups and services. It is deliberately human in scale: one coach building trust and walking alongside people as they take steps towards connection, confidence and participation.

What did you want impact measurement to help you understand?

We wanted to move beyond reporting referrals, appointments and connections to community groups. Those figures showed what the Community Coach had done, but not whether participants’ lives had changed.

We wanted to know whether people felt less isolated and more connected, better able to cope and manage day-to-day life, and more hopeful about the future. We also wanted to understand the social value of those changes relative to the program’s cost.

Just as importantly, we wanted evidence we could use to improve delivery: who was experiencing change, what appeared to be helping, whether the changes lasted and where the program could be strengthened.

We began by developing a Theory of Change that mapped the need, the support being delivered and the outcomes we expected participants to experience. This helped us separate activities from outcomes and select the ASVB questions and standardised wellbeing measures we would use to test whether those changes occurred.

How did you build measurement into day-to-day delivery?

We built the outcome questions into program touchpoints staff were already using to check-in with participants and review their progress.

Participants completed baseline questions at intake. The selected ASVB questions sat alongside the standardised wellbeing measures required by the funder and were repeated during the program, at exit and after participants had left.

This allowed us to compare each participant’s responses over time, see where change was emerging and begin to understand whether it was sustained. Because the questions were built into existing conversations, measurement became part of normal delivery rather than a separate exercise.

What happened when the evidence challenged the plan?

The evidence showed us that overall wellbeing was improving, but the outcomes we had selected did not explain the full pattern. When we looked more closely and spoke with the Community Coach, relief from depression and anxiety stood out earlier than expected. Participants described feeling less anxious about going out, finding daily tasks easier and feeling more optimistic about life.

We had not included the exact ASVB question for that outcome at intake, so we could not claim it had been measured directly. For this first group, we used relevant questions from the broader wellbeing survey as a transparent proxy. The gap showed us what to measure directly in the next cycle.

That was the learning loop in practice. The framework was not there to prove our original assumptions. It helped us see what we had missed and strengthen the evidence while the program was still developing.

We then tested two separate scenarios against the full-year program cost. The first applied the early achievement rates and three-month outcome duration to a larger group, indicating that social benefit could begin to exceed cost at around 31 participants. The second kept the original 13 participants and tested what the value might look like if their changes lasted for 12 months.