how are your people
ACTUALLY DOING?
You look after one part of someone’s life. The Compass helps you see the whole of it – and understand where your work can make a difference.
For those who work with people: clinics and care services, therapy and mental health practices, wellbeing and longevity programmes, retreats and coaching.
And for those who commission, fund or study that work: public health and social prescribing, health insurers, charities and foundations, research groups.
why this matters
People don’t live in your programme. They live in a home, a job, a street. That’s where most of what you’re trying to change gets decided.
Your numbers show how your programme is going. They don’t show whether the life around it got better. And that decides whether the progress lasts once people leave you.
what it is and what you get
The Compass asks people how life is going as a whole, not only the part you see. They mark two points on each of the seventeen living goals:: where a good life would be, and where they are now. The distance between them is the read.
What comes back is the reading: a one-page canvas of where your people stand, a full written report split by group, and a day going through it together. Clear about which of it is yours to act on.
It’s an online questionnaire, about ten minutes each, anonymously, over a two-week window.
Example – partly – read
Click image to enlarge
Try it on yourself first. It’s the same one your panel would use.
when you’d reach for the compass
It works while they’re with you.
Every measure improves over the programme, the stay, the week away. Then it slides. What pulls people back is waiting at home.
You look after one part of a person.
Symptom scores go down. Care plans get followed. The rest of a life – company, purpose, feeling at home – is harder to see. The whole-life read shows it.
You pay for the life outside the care.
Most of what drives a claim or a waiting list happens at home, at work, in the street. Loneliness, housing, money, purpose. The Compass reads that part across the people you cover.
You need to show an outcome.
Steps, uptake, retention, wellbeing scores. They show the work happened. They don’t show whether lives changed. The Compass gives you something else to measure: the same 17 Living Goals, read the same way at both ends, so you can see what moved.
You’re running a study.
Run the whole-life read alongside your existing measures. It includes a satisfaction question worded to compare with national data.
why this is different
It measures change, not activity.
Take the same read six or twelve months later and you can see what moved. Same seventeen goals, same question, so the difference is real rather than a feeling. That’s the Pulse – a read, then another, and the distance between them.
It reads a life, not a metric.
This isn’t another symptom score or outcome measure. Your numbers already track the thing you treat – the symptom, the session, the attendance. This covers the rest too: money, relationships, purpose, home, whether they feel they belong anywhere at all. Ask only about the thing you measure and that’s the only problem you’ll ever find. Read the whole picture and you see what you’re really up against.
It starts with the ideal, not the complaint.
Most surveys ask people to rate what they’ve got. The Compass asks what good looks like first, then where things stand today. Two marks on each of the seventeen living goals. The gap between them shows what is already working, where life is under pressure, and where to go.
It’s honest about what’s yours.
The read covers the whole life. The moves stay inside what you can actually change. Nobody gets told what to do about someone’s marriage.
Everyone gets something back.
Everyone who takes the Compass gets their own results – personal, theirs to keep. A read on their own answers, written for them. That’s also why the answers come back honest: people reflect differently when the reflection is their own.
You can track the programme all year and still not know how the life is going.
what it costs
One number, set by one question: how many people are you reading?
Read it twice.
One read tells you where your people stand and what to move first. Two reads, six or twelve months apart, tell you whether it worked. Same seventeen goals, same question, so the movement is real rather than a feeling. Booked together, the pair costs a quarter less than two separate reads. Change is read across the group, not per person.
On request.
In your language, or for your sector: that’s a tailored Compass reading.
how it works, start to finish
- 01
You get a join code.
- 02
You share the code with your people, through your channels.
- 03
They each spend about ten minutes on the Compass.
- 04
I write the reading, split by group where each has ten or more.
- 05
We spend a day going through it together.
Start to finish, about four weeks from the day the code goes out. Two weeks the Compass is open, and two weeks while I work through the answers.
anonymous by design
No one sees what a single person answered. Not you. Not me. Answers go straight into the totals, and nothing is reported unless at least ten people are behind it.
No names, no email addresses, no accounts. A city, and optionally a rough age, so the results can be read properly.
Honest answers are the only ones worth paying for. This is how you get them.