Is your restorative practice
delivering results?

Restorative justice projects depend on results. Without measurable outcomes, it is hard to secure and keep the funding that services rely on. Commissioners and funders expect evidence that your programme is making a difference.

The challenge every RJ service faces

Across the UK and beyond, hundreds of restorative justice projects work with victims and offenders. Some are well established, others just getting off the ground. They all face the same question: how do you define and measure success in a way that satisfies commissioners and funders, without burying coordinators in paperwork or losing sight of participant outcomes?

Police and Crime Commissioners, local authorities and charity trustees all need evidence to justify continued investment. Yet much of what restorative justice achieves is hard to quantify: moments of understanding, a victim's sense of closure, a change in an offender's direction.

With the right systems in place, good practice and measurable data support each other.

What stakeholders actually want to see

Having worked alongside restorative projects nationally and internationally, it's clear that commissioners and managers are looking for five things from the services they fund:

• Shared purpose: clear alignment between everyone involved, from facilitators to funders
• Secure connectivity: safe, compliant handling of sensitive case data across multi-agency teams
• Actionable insight: real-time visibility of caseloads, progress and outcomes
• Clear communication: timely updates that keep all parties informed without compromising confidentiality
• Proven, measurable results: evidence of victim satisfaction, offender engagement and programme effectiveness

A service that can show all five gives commissioners confidence and makes a much stronger case for continued, and increased, funding.

The hidden cost of working without the right tools

Too many restorative services still rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, encrypted emails, and manual reporting. Others have invested in a case management system that was never designed for restorative justice: a generic platform stretched to fit the RJ process. The result is the same: workarounds, inefficiencies, and critical gaps in the data you need to demonstrate your impact.

Coordinators end up spending hours anonymising data for multi-agency referrals, navigating systems that don't reflect their workflows, chasing case updates through insecure channels, and manually compiling quarterly reports that barely scratch the surface of what the service is achieving.

It also puts funding at risk. If you can't demonstrate your outcomes clearly and consistently, commissioners will look elsewhere. And if your coordinators are spending more time on administration than facilitation, your results will inevitably suffer. Research commissioned by the Ministry of Justice found that for every one hour of face-to-face engagement with participants, practitioners spend up to nine hours on background administrative work. That ratio is where costs build up, and where a system designed for RJ can make the biggest difference.

How myRJ helps you prove your impact

This is exactly why we built myRJ. Having worked as a restorative justice facilitator, I saw first-hand the everyday challenges coordinators face: sending sensitive data securely, managing complex multi-agency caseloads, and trying to produce useful outcome reports with inadequate tools. There had to be a better way.

myRJ is a purpose-built case management platform that gives restorative services everything they need to operate efficiently and demonstrate their value to funders. All case data is stored and accessed within a secure system, with role-based permissions ensuring information is only visible to allocated practitioners. Notifications sent when cases are updated contain only the case reference number, so no sensitive data leaves the platform.

But the real power for funding and stakeholder reporting lies in myRJ's outcome tracking and reporting capabilities. Managers can produce progress reports at the click of a button, tracking participant satisfaction, case outcomes, and service performance against key indicators. When a PCC or commissioner asks for evidence of results, you have it ready, accurate and up to date.

From intervention to evidence: closing the loop

The most effective restorative services don't treat measurement as an afterthought. They build it into their process from day one. When your case management system captures outcome data as part of the facilitation workflow, better data leads to better reporting, stronger funding cases and better-resourced services.

myRJ supports this cycle by enabling services to track victim satisfaction, measure participant engagement, monitor case throughput and resolution times, and generate the kind of evidence-based reports that commissioners and funders require. The system can be accessed on any device with an internet connection, so whether your facilitators are in the office or in the field, every interaction contributes to the bigger picture.

Tracking progress on restorative interventions keeps victims at the centre and gives managers the evidence stakeholders need. With the right platform behind your service, you can show the progress you're making.