Impactmeting en evaluatie van de Drempelmeter: Toegankelijkheidsscan voor organisaties

The city of Hasselt has developed the threshold meter together with a focus group of intermediary and experience experts. An expert in poverty and social exclusion was hired by the city of Hasselt for 1 year to help develop and monitor the threshold meter in the initial phase. The threshold meter was launched in February 2017 and the first pilot group of organizations and associations is currently working to test the threshold meter in practice.
Based on the Threshold Meter, organizations can gain insight into their accessibility, and this in various areas, such as physical accessibility and accessibility, understandable language use and gender-neutral services. Special is the confrontation with possible invisible, but very tangible, thresholds.
The developed Threshold Meter focuses on people in vulnerable positions and uses a complete approach to diversity. (poverty, disability, origin, culture, gender and sexual identity). But we strive for a result that adds value to everyone. In other words, the developed tool inspires organizations to pursue a structural policy on accessibility and participation. The Threshold Meter strengthens organizations in creating support for working on accessibility and participation. In recent years, the Threshold Meter has been tested by a first pilot group. Meanwhile, there has also been a lot of interest in the tool from other cities and municipalities. That is why in this project we want to focus on the standardization of the tool by means of a scientifically based evaluation so that it can serve as "good practice" for other interested organizations and local authorities.
The aim of this project is therefore the dissemination of the threshold meter as a tool to other cities and municipalities. To this end, two important aspects must be included:
1) impact measurement of the Threshold Meter on the accessibility of organizations in various areas.
2) evaluation of the process organizations go through in the context of the DM, by focusing on the user-friendliness, effectiveness and efficiency of the DM and associated pathway guidance
ct (effect evaluation) of the Threshold Meter in a more scientific (evidence-based) way. The first step is to identify indicators based on a literature study to make valid statements about measuring the accessibility of organizations. A digital DM questionnaire is then developed that can be used by various users. We pay attention to visual visibility (eg: color blindness) and clear language. The tool will be tested by experts (people in poverty, non-native speakers, people with low literacy, people with a visual handicap,…). Based on the eDM questionnaire and an additional survey, identify indicators that can visually represent the accessibility of an organization. On the basis of this, the accessibility of an organization can be presented in a measurable way, making the bottlenecks clearer. By evaluating accessibility over time, this measuring instrument can determine to what extent the use of the DM has a beneficial effect (i.e. increases the accessibility of organizations).

The second part of this project focuses on process evaluation, examining to what extent users are satisfied with the Threshold Meter and the guided process, how organizations use the DM materials box, what factors improve accessibility, and what the added value was of a guided route, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the Threshold Meter with or without guidance.