Later this month I’ll clock up the magic (but entirely arbitrary) 100 days in post as SEBP’s Chief Operating Officer. It’s been a steep learning curve that’s included juggling our annual conference with balancing getting to grips with a whole new remit with entertaining children through the long summer holidays. Hard work but rewarding and the fog has begun to clear on the short, medium and long-term direction of travel for the charity, so that's what I want to tell you about this time.
The biggest accomplishment so far, and one which is certainly not mine alone, has been the very successful SEBP2024 conference we held in Cambridge in September. The feedback we received was incredible. 80% of attendees told us it added a great deal or a lot of value to their day-to-day work. We know this because we evaluated it, naturally. The conference is emblematic of SEBP’s journey in its first decade and a bit. It’s run professionally by people volunteering their time for the cause and it enables people with an interest in the field to meet, discuss and think about applied research. This is what SEBP exists for – to help people working in and around policing to use, produce and communicate evidence to make policing better.
The problem is that the annual conference is bloody hard work, and it only reaches a few hundred people live. It’s great value for those who can attend, but we have more than ten times that many members and hope to have many, many more in future. Sharing our recordings of the conference sessions on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@sebp-uk, means those who cannot be there don’t miss out entirely. But we could be doing a lot more so that we reach more people more often and add more value to their practice.
Enter the Theory of Change methodology...
For those not familiar, Theory of Change is the Tenet (Christopher Nolan film, look it up) of planning tools. You start at the end and work backwards. You can find a preview of ours below, and I’ll be sharing more details on our website shortly.
For now, the key points I want to explain are:
1. SEBP exists to provide police practitioners with the skills, knowledge, tools, imperative and community resources they need to do their jobs in evidence-informed ways.
2. To do this, SEBP needs to focus most of its activity on providing value for its existing members.
We know we can do more for our members than we currently do and correcting this is top of the to-do list. The immediate vehicle for this will be.....
When launched, this will be far more exciting than my half-baked attempt at a logo might suggest (our Design Lead will conjure a more professional one by then). The Hub will be an exclusive online space (via www.sebp.police.uk) where our members can access resources to help them whatever their role in policing is. The initial release, which will be ready by January 2025, will include:
Exclusive articles
‘Get Started’ guides
Free training courses
Videos from all our past events
Signposting to other EBP resources
Templates for presentations and lessons on EBP
The Hub will be a live tool and we’ll be integrating Apps, community features and more soon after launch.
There will be lots more to come from SEBP beyond the Hub but for now, it’s my number one priority and I would love to hear from you about what you would like to see there. In the next couple of weeks, members will get a very short survey from us to help us establish a baseline that we can use to track the effectiveness of these tools and it will include space for you to tell us what you’d like, but don’t wait until then to talk to me because the first build is happening right now. You can get in touch with me at coo@sebp.police.uk.
Until next time,
Matt