Working Together for Advice project

What was Working Together For Advice?

The Advice Services Alliance (ASA) was awarded £ 5,714,752 by the Big Lottery Fund under the first phase of its Advice Plus programme. The funding was to deliver a multiple strand project providing a range of support services to independent advice centres in England.

The project was independently evaluated and the executive summary of the evaluation is now available.

How can the project help me?

The project is now complete. The evaluation report estimated that around 500 advice agencies benefited directly from the project during its delivery period, but many of the outputs of the project were focused on producing resources to ‘roll out’ the learning from the work we did. These resources include toolkits, guidance and best practice guides. For example:

• In ‘How to measure outcomes’, you can find help on how to develop questionnaires to collect data about the outcomes of your work, together with a spreadsheet which analyses your data.
• In ‘Partnerships’, you can find documents that will help you setting up an advice forum.
• In ‘Promoting your service and building relationships’, you can find a toolkit on user and stakeholder involvement; and guides on coping with bad press, producing a newsletter, and writing a press release.
• In ‘Staff development’, you can find a register of approved trainers.

All resources produced under this project are accessible through this website under the following themes:

• How to measure client outcomes
• Partnerships
• Developing Discrimination Advice
• Staff development
• Promoting your service and building relationships
• Access and demand
• Quality

Who was involved in the project?

The project was delivered by a consortium comprising:

• Advice Services Alliance
• AdviceUK
• Age UK (formerly Age Concern)
• Citizens Advice
• Law Centres Federation
• Youth Access

What did it aim to do?

The overall aims of the project were to:

• Increase access to advice
• Enhance the quality of advice
• Demonstrate the value of advice
• Improve the efficiency of advice services
• Build the capacity of the advice sector

How did it achieve this?

The advice networks collaborated on eight workstreams and engaged the help of advice agencies to pilot resources and develop good practice guidance.
 
The project ran until March 2011.