Reviewing How Community Organisations Are Supported

A dedicated support unit had spent years building close, trusted relationships with a wide network of community organisations. Five-year planning was embedded across the network, engagement levels were high, and the team had a genuine sense that the work was making a real difference to the organisations they supported.

What the unit wanted now was a rigorous, evidence-based way to demonstrate that impact clearly and consistently, and to take an honest look at how the support model itself was operating. Not because anyone doubted the work, but because strong relationships and a sense of progress are not the same as a structured, reproducible picture of what is actually changing across the network. Individual knowledge of individual organisations does not add up to a systematic view of collective impact. And without that, it is difficult to make the case for how the support model should develop over time, or to identify where better use of technology and smarter processes could improve the experience for both the community organisations being supported and the staff delivering that support.

Red Mountain conducted a structured review across more than 30 organisations in the network, combining documentary analysis with in-depth interviews to build a comprehensive picture of how the support relationship was working in practice.

Our approach to process mapping and associated team support is to review it from both the process owner's perspective and from that of those who experience the process as users or customers. To do that, we ran a Discovery Phase which included: 1:1 interviews, focus groups, issued a survey and mapped out the current state process.

The Community Organisations' Perspective

For the organisation's users, we issued a survey to all 30+ community groups, and ran six in-depth interviews, chosen deliberately to go beyond surface-level satisfaction. The goal was to understand what was genuinely helping organisations move forward, what was less useful than it could be, and where the support process itself was adding administrative steps without adding value to the organisations on the receiving end.

The Sponsoring Organisation's Perspective

For the sponsoring organisation themselves we ran five in-depth interviews with leadership staff and a focus group with all other staff who touch on or support the process. We worked closely with the client to map and verify the current state process. Finally, we ran a series of collaborative workshops to identify and solve the challenges and opportunities that were uncovered in the Discovery Phase of the project.

Designing the Methodology

This was the first review of its kind that the unit had undertaken, which made the design of the methodology as important as the findings it produced. The approach needed to be rigorous enough to produce evidence that would hold up internally and externally, and sensitive enough to protect the trust-based relationships that were central to everything the unit did. Getting the methodology wrong could have damaged the very relationships the review was intended to strengthen.

The review produced the unit's first evidence-based picture of its own impact across the network: a clear account of what was working well, where the support model could evolve, and a foundation for demonstrating collective progress to internal and external stakeholders. The unit moved from knowing their work was making a difference to being able to show it, with the rigour and consistency that turns a shared sense of progress into a credible, communicable case for the value being created.

Because the process refinement work had been co-created with the community engagement officers rather than done to them, the resulting recommendations carried both credibility and buy-in. The unit had a grounded understanding of where technology and smarter ways of working could reduce friction and free up more of the time and energy that the community engagement work depends on, developed by the people who understood that work most closely.

What the review captured, more than anything, was the strength of what already existed. The community engagement representatives knew the organisations and the people in them well enough to anticipate needs, navigate challenges, and sustain relationships that held the whole network together. The review gave that work a credible, structured voice and pointed clearly to where changes in process and systems could protect and deepen it.