Of all places, I was in a BP service station when the penny dropped for me that the true measure of SEBP’s ‘success’ was not in its number of members but in the amount of meaningful value those members actually got from being a member. This might seem a rather obvious thing to realise but as anyone in policing will know, it’s easy to get sucked in to the things that are easy to count in front of the things that really matter (zing!).
And so, the idea of the Members’ Hub was born. This was on 23rd October last year. We turned on the Hub this Monday (10th March). In the four months in-between, I have tested our Design Leads’ patience to breaking point but he is a diamond and here we are – SEBP members now have access to their own online space.
The original concept was strikingly simple: create a resource that people can use if they want to find, understand and use evidence in their policing job. The detail of that is rather trickier. SEBP’s 6,000+ members have every sort of policing role there is. The way a neighbourhood sergeant might use evidence is different to how a policy officer might. To cover all that ground, this resource needs to cater for the widest array of problems and scenarios in which practitioners might need to call on evidence.
We are starting simple and not letting “perfect be the enemy of the good”, as the saying goes. At release the Members’ Hub has six ‘things’. They are:
1. A Knowledge Base: it explains what EBP is to a pretty decent level of detail.
2. Partner resources: a selection of links to third party sites.
3. A video library: FINALLY a way to publish all the video content we’ve amassed.
4. A training course: an 8-hour self-paced video introduction to EBP program.
5. A member impact survey: so we can gather info on what we do and demonstrate the impact of it.
6. A way to change your ‘account profile’, including adding a pic and bio.
My inner perfectionist considers this to be a rather modest selection of resources but, it’s a start and it took a lot of love for it to exist. I am super-grateful to our brilliant team of volunteers, led by the Home Office's James Watson on this project. Dr Stevie-Jade Hardy at the Youth Endowment Fund has also been instrumental in making this happen and we'll be working close with YEF and other partners on developing this resource in future.
In fact, new features will start to appear quite quickly.
We (well, I – the Design Lead needs some persuading) have plans for a community area where members can interact with each other. For almost it’s entire existence the best benefit of SEBP has been the networking opportunity it affords and we want to bring this into the Hub and replicate the types of connections people have made at our events over the years. We envision a forum and the ability to join topic and geographical discussion groups. We’ll supplement this with spaces for organisations to post EBP-related jobs and research opportunities.
We’re also developing applications aimed at opening up the evidence-base to a wider audience. The first of these is a project that our technology partner, CGI, is managing for us and we aim to launch that in the autumn at our national conference (tickets available soon).
For now, were starting small and hoping to grow steadily. Wherever we go in future we want to put the members at the heart of the functions we build into the hub so that it can be truly useful and not just for show. So let me know what you want to see and we’ll try to make it happen quickly. In the meantime – please go check it out and let us know what think: https://www.sebp.police.uk/members-hub
Thanks and enjoy!
Matt