Partner gap analysis

The brief

As part of their delivery model, West London Zone (WLZ), our charity partner, work with around 50 specialist support partners to provide opportunities to children and young people in social, emotional and academic risk areas.

As the outreach of the organisation is scaling, they need to identify where there might be gaps in support and demand in the future so they’re able to effectively serve more members of the youth community.

Be UK kicked off a pro bono project to offer practical advice and support to help WLZ better assess their growing support requirements.

Our approach

There were four main workstreams:

• Clean up of data: the partner data provided in Excel was thoroughly reviewed, sanitised, classified and filtered to enable comprehensive analysis.
• Analysis and visualisation of data: we then analysed the cleansed partner data to identify trends and and map out the future supply of services from partners across the different metrics (year group, support type, outcome, geographical location, class size etc.). This then allowed us to identify potential gaps in support services, which we presented in a visual graphic format.
• Identification and measurement of gaps and scalability: using the analysis and visualisation of the different types of data, we identified the areas where supply from partners might meets or exceed demand in the future. We also performed a scalability exercise to suggest ways to scale up provisison of services efficiently either by developing capabilities from current partners or approaching additional partners.

The solution and key benefits

The output for WLZ was a presentation summarising the results of the analysis and the scalability exercise and highlighting key areas to focus on.

We also provided an Excel template that contained the cleansed data and summary tabs that will auto-update as WLZ add more information/update information in the data tab. This is a tool WLZ can use and update themselves, and allows them to adjust partner numbers to assess potential scalability scenarios.

This piece of work is a huge step forward in ensuring the children and young people within WLZ’s program get the support they need.

Kate Welsh, Head of Partnerships, West London Zone: “Be UK understood the brief completely and were thoughtful, thorough and efficient in their organisation of the project. The analysis and the Excel tool were exactly what I was looking for and will enable me to start planning for the next few years. A huge thank you to the team for their consultation and work on the project.”