Trident's summer of surveys nears completition

Published by Dawn Prentice for Dawn Prentice Communications in Communities and also in Education, Environment, Health, Housing

The Trident Social Investment Group, which houses 6,000 people across the Midlands,is coming to the end of a 'summer of surveys' as part of a big push to engage tenants, communities and stakeholders more effectively and to assess the quality of the Group's services and impact on the local community, economy and environment.

The 'summer of surveys' has included a STAR PLUS interview survey of 600 tenants, two tracking surveys of recipients of repairs and new lettings, and a survey of stakeholders as part of Trident's groundbreaking social audit.

John Morris, Trident Chief Executive, said: "Trident's introduction of ongoing tracker surveys and the development of a bi-annual STAR PLUSsurvey are one of the ways Trident is moving beyond co-regulation to co-production of services. These surveys have been developed with our Scrutiny Panel and go beyond asking tenants simply to mark the quality of services they receive. Our survey approach is to integrate customer satisfaction with evaluation of our community impact and VFM. As the country's first social investment group, we are highly committed to evaluating how well we support communities at a time of austerity, measuring our contribution to often fragile local economies during the double dip, and gauging VFM from tenants' perspective.

"Our surveys, including an in-depth series of interviews with our stakeholders from a range of sectors, are also feeding into the first social audit by a social housing provider. Our social audit seeks to assess the totality of Trident's impact from all activities - not just social and community investment alone.

"The social audit is a '360 degree' way of providing evidence of the effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, of our work as a social purpose organisation. So as well as measuring the social return on our investment in local communities and the social value produced, we also ask tenants, communities and stakeholders for their views so that we can integrate statistics and KPIs with softer measures such as opinions and human case histories. In this way we are confident of developing a comprehensive and top to bottom audit of all of our activities."