Measure the success of your strategy
How will you monitor?
Having established what to monitor and when, decide how you’ll do the monitoring – what indicators you’ll use.
An indicator could be:
- changes in decibel levels (to monitor noise)
- number of accidents to pedestrians (to monitor pedestrian safety)
- number of complaints received by council staff (to monitor dog controls).
Brainstorm all the possible indicators you could use for each of the things you’ll monitor. Choose the best indicator or indicators by assessing them against these criteria:
- is it policy relevant?
- is it analytically valid?
- is it cost effective?
- is it simple and easy to understand?
These are standard criteria that are widely used internationally.
Reference material
Waimakariri
District Council rated the AER ‘a pedestrian-friendly Rangiora township’
priority one for monitoring. Possible indicators included: number of accidents
for pedestrians, number of road closures, number and location of facilities,
and feelings of safety reported by pedestrians.
Each possible indicator was assessed against the standard criteria, and one of the indicators selected was ‘feelings of safety reported by participants’. Staff then reworded it to include a location and a timeframe.
Annual or two-yearly changes of community perceptions of pedestrian safety on High Street (Business One Zone).
This exercise was part of a one-day workshop in which council staff used the ‘Pressure-State-Response’ framework to develop their indicators.
Using
indicator criteria [Word doc 25kb]
Developing
indicators from attributes [Word doc 70kb]
Information
sheet: identifying indicators for Maori
Using
the PSR framework [Word doc 195kb]
Once you’ve chosen an indicator or indicators, make sure each one has a clear location and timeframe.
