Vital Signs® is a community programme which uses local knowledge to measure the vitality of a community and support action towards improving the collective quality of life. It was originally developed by Community Foundations of Canada and has been adopted around the world. It effectively gauges the quality of life as determined by the community. This information creates a benchmark measurement which can be used by individuals and philanthropic organisations to target their giving more effectively.
The Bermuda Foundation (formerly operating as Bermuda Community Foundation) introduced Vital Signs® to Bermuda in 2017 as a means of evaluating what is important to residents’ quality of life. The foundation’s Vital Signs® research enables donors to become better informed and community service providers to remain targeted on the most important quality of life issues.
The outcomes used to populate the Bermuda Vital Signs® Outcomes Wizard have been curated from many, many publicly available outcome and programme databases, most notably the Outcomes Matrix produced by Good Finance in collaboration with Big Society Capital, other social investment financial intermediaries and the Outcomes Indicators Project by the Urban Institute.
The Bermuda Foundation thanks Good Finance for granting us permission to modify and use the database published on their site and to adapt their outcomes matrix tables for use in Bermuda and the Bermuda Vital Signs® Programmes. It is our understanding that the outcomes matrix was initially developed by Big Society Capital in partnership with social investment financial intermediaries, front line organisations and impact experts including the Good Analyst, New Philanthropy Capital, Social Value International and Triangle Consulting. The primary database of outcomes have been augmented and adapted to local programmes and practices benefitting from work done by the Urban Institute, the Impact Genome Project and the Bermuda Civil Society Project.
The subscription fees assessed on using this online tool to generate bespoke reports go towards the data customisation, IT development and design and platform access and maintenance - not access to the data itself. There are a wide variety of publicly available, no-cost programme design tools and databases for anyone interested in doing the research.
The Bermuda Vital Signs® programme has involved the delivery of Flagship and summary reports, quality of life convenings resulting in sets of prioritised outcomes for each priority area and now, this Outcomes Wizard tool – all guided by a representative sample of the population. The outcomes prioritisation process enabled us to make a statement about which outcome areas are important to residents and the type of programmes and services that help to improve outcomes in that area. We have cross-walked the country-level prioritised outcomes to the programme-level outcomes.
For more information on the Bermuda Vital Signs® convenings and prioritisation process, go to Bermuda Vital Signs