What is it?: A tool to look at attribution and how much of a change can
be attributed to you.
How can it be useful for a street-connected young
people focussed organisation to measure impact?
This is an exercise that can often be done in tandem with the other exercises to try to
assess how much of the change being discussed the stakeholder/s attributes to your
organisation, compared to other significant groups of people in the young person’s
life.
To make this valuable you need to think carefully about who the
other significant groups could be. It is worth including an
“other” category and then having the group define who other is
so that you have flexibility for different group contexts.
The wheel will help your stakeholders to identify who the most significant influences
were to help to create any identified change (positive or negative) and to identify the
ratio effect that the different groups might have had upon them.
This tool is helpful as the analysis can help you to identify other
groups you might need to partner with or do more work with to
increase your impact and help to make change more
sustainable. It also helps you to be realistic in considering how
much of an affect your services are having.
How can it been adapted to help street-connected children to
participate and engage with it?
Some points to think about:
You should consider that young people might know the organisation through a key
worker so it can be worth reminding them that Madam or Sir is representing a
particular organisation. The seed scatter method with visual images will best help
young people who aren’t very literate yet to be able to participate.
Think about how you can create a safe space for the young people to be comfortable
in and to feel like they can answer honestly and not just try to tell you what they
think you want to hear.
It could be worth doing this exercise individually, rather than as
a group, as sometimes people have a tendency to copy each
other, when it is easy to observe what the other group
members have chosen.
It’s also an easy exercise for people to rush on – so you need to
facilitate it carefully to make sure that the results are well
thought through.
Before the session starts: Design your wheel by consulting your stakeholders as to relevant groups to include. Keep an “other”
category too to allow for flexibility in different contexts of groups that haven’t been considered so
Resources needed:
far. Or an alternative way of doing this is to get the young people to draw a pie chart and use
A wheel that is designed for your needs
different size sections of the wheel to represent the level of importance they assign to different
Piles of large seeds or counters
groups. Gather the large seeds or counters (enough for 20 per participant).
(recommended 20 per participant)
A method you could use to facilitate the session:
2 facilitators if running it as a group
exercise – one to lead and one to count
Recording sheet
1. Start by explaining what you are trying to do and set ground rules i.e. that there are no
wrong answers and how you plan to use the information they give you, and thus why their honest feedback will be the most
helpful.
2. Identify a change that you are going to explore using the wheel (this could be following on from one of the earlier exercises).
3. Think about the change you have identified. Ask the stakeholders to think about who the people
or organisations are who have helped them in making that change. Discuss ideas of who could
have helped as a group.
4. Give the stakeholders 20 large seeds each and a copy of the wheel each, and ask them to split
the beans across the wheel according to the help they felt was given to them by different actors
on the wheel to make that identified change. All seeds need to be used and any actors who are
not on the wheel that they identified need to be counted under other. Ask them to spend time
thinking this through carefully.
5. When they have placed the seeds ask them to discuss why they placed them in that way, they
might choose to adjust their seeds after thinking it through more. Have a second facilitator count the split of beans and enter
it in the recording table.
6. Explain how you will use the information from the session and thank your stakeholders for their participation.
Recording the data: Enter the data into the table showing the numerical split between the different categories for analysis.