In practice, using the W3 Framework involves going through each of the W3 Functions, thinking about your specific work, and reflecting on questions like:
- What does this function mean for us?
- What does strong work within this function look like for us?
- What do we do — or what do we need to do — to achieve strong impact in this function?
- How would we know if we were achieving strong impact within this function?
- What would we be seeing in our communities?
- What would we be seeing in the way we work?
- What would we be seeing in the broader health sector and policy environment?
- Better understand your work (and therefore explain it more effectively to others)
- Understand how your work uses the skill, knowledge, and insights of your peer workers (and therefore understand how best to utilise and build the capacity of your peer workforce)
- Develop tailored evaluation indicators for your work (and therefore capture its full impact and value)
- Better understand the data and information you already collect and have access to within your organisation (and therefore streamline and improve your data collection processes, and the way you use your data)
- Understand where gaps in your data collection processes are limiting your ability to prove your full impact and value (and therefore improve your data collection processes)
- People living with HIV: This post series includes information about how PLHIV peer workers are using (or have used) the W3 Framework in their work
- People who use drugs: This post series includes information about how PWUD and PWID peer workers are using (or have used) the W3 Framework in their work
Other peer-led organisations have used the W3 Framework to:
- Support more meaningful data collection
- Increase peer staff confidence and motivation around monitoring and evaluation
- Capture the unique impact of their activities
- Build stronger evidence of their contributions towards relevant state and national health strategies
- What Works and Why (W3) Project Impact Analysis report: includes case studies describing how the W3 Framework was used in a variety of ways by four Australian state and national peer-led organisations
- People living with HIV: This post series includes information about how PLHIV peer workers are using (or have used) the W3 Framework in their work
- People who use drugs: This post series includes information about how PWUD and PWID peer workers are using (or have used) the W3 Framework in their work
The W3 Functions are quite broad and align with most types of peer work that we have seen using the W3 Framework. We encourage peer responses to use the expertise of their peer staff to help define the W3 Functions in the context of their specific work. The Part 2 of the W3 Framework Guide — the W3 Framework application process — provides guidance to help you do this. Other information that might help: Our publications from Stage 1 of the W3 Project might help explain how the W3 Framework aligns with:
- Peer network–targeted health promotion for gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men
- Peer leadership and policy participation of people living with HIV (PLHIV)
- Peer service provision and policy participation of people who use drugs
- PLHIV and PWUD peer workers are using (or have used) the W3 Framework in their work
- Peer work functions within Australia’s national responses to hepatitis C and HIV
It is probably more helpful for you to look at this from the other direction: how do your current indicators (KPIs, processes, outputs, outcomes) align to the W3 Functions?
This will help you understand what you already collect and where your gaps are.
You could also use the W3 Framework to better understand how your work across all four W3 Functions helps you create the specific impacts your funders are interested in. This may help you advocate for the inclusion of additional indicators to help measure impact — or for additional funding to help you achieve this impact — across all four W3 Indicators.
It might — but most organisations have found that they actually streamlined their data collection processes at the same time as finding ways of collecting the extra data they needed to fill gaps. You could also use the W3 Framework to better understand how your work across all four W3 Functions helps you create the specific impacts your funders are interested in. This may help you advocate for the inclusion of additional indicators to help measure impact — or for additional funding to help you achieve and measure this impact — across all four W3 Indicators. Using the W3 Framework to guide data collection is really about understanding exactly what data and information you have (or could have) access to, and how best to use it. For example:
- Peer organisations have a lot of information that they often don’t think of as ‘data’. For example, meeting minutes from team discussions or interagency groups can be evidence of changing trends in communities and the sector. Decisions that come from these meetings are examples of adaptation. MOUs and contracts are evidence of alignment. Using the W3 Framework to reflect on your work can help you identify this kind of evidence.
- Sometimes, though analysing your data collection processes, you find that you are collecting the same thing multiple times in multiple places, or that you are collecting data in one place that would be useful in another place. These discoveries can help you streamline your data collection processes and make the most of the data you are already collecting.
- Sometimes, by reflecting on how you know you are having impact, you realise that you have no data to back this up. In these cases, you might be able to figure out a way of adding a simple additional question to a survey or intake form that help you fill this gap. For example, by adding a question that asked clients where they would have gone for clean injecting equipment if not to them, a peer-led harm reduction organisation could collect evidence about how many people would have gone without sterile equipment if their service did not exist
- Our essential guide about evaluating peer work talks about why you might not be getting the most out of your evaluations if your sole focus is on reporting to funders