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Community legal centres (CLCs) are operating within an increasingly competitive and sophisticated working environment. Funders, as well as service users and clients, are keen to better understand the value of the services they support or rely on.

Commonwealth and State governments are embarking on a range of new funding and contracting strategies, centred on achieving better value from public investment in services, and moving on from seeking just quantitative measures - outputs - to assessing the qualitative results of their investment - outcomes. This will increasingly influence decisions about the funding of CLCs. 

Benefits for clients

Clients can have confidence that community legal centres' work can improve their circumstances, and that services will be delivered appropriately.

Benefits for services

Outcome measurement supports evaluation of program effectiveness, and helps community legal centres understand if they're using their limited resources in the most effective way. This can provide the basis for organisational change and improvement. ​

Benefits for partners

Measuring the outcomes of our work demonstrates that community organisations can work in partnership with CLCs and refer clients with confidence; that we support and improve the work of governments and their agencies, and that volunteers make a meaningful contribution and develop their own skills.

Benefits for funders

As funders focus less on the number of activities and outputs, community legal centres that are able to measure and demonstrate the link between their work and community level impacts are of more interest to funders, including government and philanthropists.

​Read more about this project and about our theory of change, which provides a framework to better understand and measure the qualitative impact of the work of CLCs.