How Plinth helps Inspire South Tyneside

Why did you start using plinth?

In South Tyneside, we have a really strong voluntary sector with lots of different community groups supporting people. But, with funding cuts and problems coming from the cost of living crisis, we were worried about the effects of groups closing

People may not realise the closures of small groups until it reaches the point where there's a knock-on effect on the public sector.

We wanted to be able to see if this was happening, so we could help support organisations at risk.

Had you done any work like this before?

Yes, we'd done some previous mapping work of our local organisations, looking at the hotspots and coldspots across the Borough, and a deep-dive focused on the ward of Simonside and Rekendyke.

But we knew that we were not reaching as many groups and organisations as we could, and knew that this would just be a point in time exercise.

Plinth gave us an opportunity to collect this information on an ongoing basis, and understand the impact in really granular detail.

Was there anything that helped with getting started?

There were definitely a couple of changes in the Borough that provided some impetus for doing something new.

We had new leadership in the Council, with a new strategy, and also the CCG was moving to a new Integrated Care Board. All of this meant there was more opportunity to change the way we were working.

How did you get set up with Plinth?

The idea was to support organisations getting set up with Plinth as a case management, impact measurement and reporting tool.

Then we would connect all these organisations together into a South Tyneside Community Page, so we could see the whole picture of what was happening in the Borough.

That meant we had a calendar of all the activities being organised, a platform for volunteer brokerage and a way to see the impact of all the work being done.

Was there a plan to get buy-in from local organisations?

Yes, so the idea was to do it with a cohort-based approach.

We started with the groups that had engaged with our earlier mapping work.

With the first groups, we had one-to-one sessions to get them set up, and then we did a group training session to get them all using it.

From that cohort, it started spreading, with people outside the first cohort getting a bit jealous and asking us if they could use the platform too.

One thing we did learn was to get creative in the outreach. We know people are often drowning in information and emails and have too many meetings in the diary so we piggy-backed on other events that we knew people would be prioritising like our funding forum. If you get everyone in the same room as the National Lottery, people will come!

And has that changed since the initial rollout?

It's been very interesting as the use of Plinth has spread.

It's started to develop a bit of a unique South Tyneside identity, with groups using the platform in ways we didn't expect, like a cricket club looking at using it to hire out their venue space.

It has been really helpful to have the Plinth team responding to any problems and discussing new features as groups ask for them.

So now we have quite a few "pioneers" of the platform, who are really strong advocates of it. And we're confident we'll have over 60% of the sector using the platform by next year.

What are your hopes for the future?

Practically, we've been working more closely with the Council, e.g. to work with them on their HAF programme. We're also working with the GP surgeries to help them have access to the activities on the platform

We'd also like to look more into the impact data that's being collected in more detail, especially on referral pathways.

But, perhaps most importantly, we think it's starting to change the power dynamics between the sector and our public sector partners.

We can now come to them with clear evidence and data for the impact of the sector, and can speak with a collective voice.