Why measurable outcomes are essential for sustaining funding, satisfying stakeholders, and proving the value of your restorative justice programme.
Results are the lifeblood of any restorative justice project. Without measurable outcomes, securing and sustaining the funding that keeps vital services running becomes an uphill battle. In today's commissioning landscape, stakeholders don't just want to hear that your programme is making a difference — they want to see the evidence.
Across the UK and beyond, hundreds of restorative justice projects are working to transform the lives of victims and offenders. Some are well established, others just getting off the ground. But they all share a common challenge: how do you define and measure success in a way that satisfies commissioners and funders, without burying your coordinators in paperwork or losing sight of what matters most — participant outcomes?
This is the tension at the heart of every restorative service. Police and Crime Commissioners, local authorities, and charity trustees all need tangible evidence to justify continued investment. Yet the real value of restorative justice — the moments of understanding, the shift in a victim's sense of closure, the change in an offender's trajectory — can feel difficult to quantify.
The answer isn't to choose between meaningful work and measurable data. It's to put the right systems in place so that one naturally supports the other.
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:
When a service can demonstrate all five, it inspires confidence. It unites managers, volunteers, and stakeholders around a shared mission. And critically, it makes the case for continued — and increased — funding far more compelling.
“The best reason to start an organisation is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.”
Guy KawasakiToo many restorative services still rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, encrypted emails, and manual reporting. Others have invested in a case management system, but one that was never designed for restorative justice — a generic platform being stretched and manipulated to try 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.
This isn't just inefficient — it's a direct threat to funding. 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 escalate — and where the right purpose-built system can make the biggest difference.
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 meaningful 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 are sent when cases are updated, containing only the case reference number — no sensitive data ever 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. This means that when a PCC or commissioner asks for evidence of results, you have it ready — accurate, comprehensive, and up to date.
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 a natural part of the facilitation workflow, you create a virtuous cycle: better data leads to better reporting, which leads to stronger funding cases, which leads to better-resourced services that can deliver even more positive outcomes.
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.
Measuring and tracking progress on restorative interventions ensures victims remain the key focus while giving managers the tools to generate long-term value for stakeholders through proven results. Restorative justice is the way forward — and with the right platform behind your service, there's nothing standing in the way of demonstrating the progress you're making.
See how myRJ can help your service produce the evidence stakeholders need to sustain and grow your funding.
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