This year’s report The British Council is an executive non-departmental public body and a charity audited by the National Audit Office. Our charitable objects, set out in our Royal Charter are to:

Our annual report meets the requirements of Her Majesty’s Treasury for the reporting of non-departmental public bodies and the requirements of the Charity Commission. It is the public record of our achievements over the last financial year. It identifies the government grants we have received and demonstrates how we have used this money, along with income we generate from our own activities, to provide benefits for the UK.

This report sets out the progress we have made towards the targets in our Corporate plan for 2006–08. The plan was informed by the strategic priorities of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as our sponsoring department and the requirements of our Board of Trustees.

Measuring progress Our scorecard measures our performance in the following areas: the impact we make; the audiences we engage with and reach; and the level of satisfaction of our customers and stakeholders.

In this report we show our performance in 2007–08 compared with our results in the previous year (2006–07) and the targets we set for ourselves in our Corporate plan for 2006–08.

How to read the data All scores are reported out of 100. The majority of scores we record are in the range 75–85 indicating a level of performance that can be classed as ‘good’ or ‘very good’. However, what is more important is progress against established baselines, our trends, and improving future levels of performance.

We are again using a traffic light system to highlight areas of success or concern:
Target not met target not met; more than five per cent at variance
Target partly met target partly met; up to five per cent variance
Target met target met or exceeded.

Our story for the year: scorecard results for 2007–08 Overall, we have made good progress this year against a background of significant organisational change. Our combined audience figure was 128 million, an increase of almost 25 million on last year. Our engagement figure of 15.6 million is slightly lower than last year, as is the combined score against our Evaluation of long-term outcomes (ELTO) measure. Encouragingly, our customer satisfaction score remains at the high level of 80, the figure achieved last year. We have set ourselves demanding targets to drive high performance. Next year there will be further improvements and refinements to our measurement system.

Impact We measure our impact against five corporate outputs through a worldwide sample survey that collated data from 270,000 of our customers in 2007–08. These outputs are:

• 1 Internationalism: relationships brokered by the British Council broaden the international views of young people.
• 2 Long-term relationships: an increase in the number of quality relationships between the UK and other countries.
• 3 Positive partnerships: the UK is increasingly recognised as a country of choice for partnering positive social change.
• 4 Self-development: the UK is increasingly recognised as a country able to satisfy aspirations for self-development.
• 5 Creative ideas and achievements: the UK is increasingly seen as the country of choice for its creative ideas and achievements.

The corporate level results for these five outputs are shown on the chart below and by region in the Regional performance section.

We increased our impact score against four out of five of our corporate outputs and met our target for the first three. Projects reporting against these outputs fall almost entirely into the grant- and partnership-funded segment of our work. Our self-development and creativity outputs results are in line with 2006–07 but we did not reach the stretch improvement targets we had set for ourselves.

Audience We measure our audience in terms of: engagement – the target audience we interact with on a personal basis; and reach – the larger audience with whom we interact online or through other broadcast means.

The slight reduction in our engagement figure is in part because of the period of significant organisational change we have gone through and because we have started to target our work in some regions more tightly on influencers to maximise indirect impact and widen our networks.

Customer satisfaction These results are drawn from the 270,000 sample mentioned above and comprise two component metrics: meeting expectations and quality of delivery. This year’s combined corporate score of 80 is strong and in line with the previous year, although slightly behind our target of 82. Of the two components we scored more strongly on quality of delivery. We believe that our more customer-focused, new product-development process and the move to larger-scale products will help us improve our results against meeting customer expectations. We will be reporting separately on these two satisfaction measures in the future.

Evaluation of long-term outcomes (ELTO) We track the benefits and value to the UK of long-term relationships among our audience of decision-makers and senior influencers by undertaking a sample survey in a rolling selection of countries in a region. This year the total survey population was 1,200. The overall ELTO score is made up of three separate measures: strengthening of ties with the UK, personal beneficial changes and organisation beneficial changes.

The corporate level results from this ELTO study are shown below. ELTO results at a regional level are discussed in the relevant regional sections.

On the basis of the sample size, our overall result for the year (78) is statistically in line with last year (80). However, our result for the individual component – strengthening of ties with the UK, is significantly lower than last year, having fallen to 68. We believe that this result partly reflects a need to work more consistently over time through our projects with our senior level audiences.

National Audit Office study of scorecard In its value-for-money study of the British Council carried out in 2007, the National Audit Office endorsed our performance measurement system as a benchmark for public diplomacy organisations. We aim to use the insights from this study to develop and further improve our measurement systems in 2008 and beyond.

About the scorecard and changes in 2008–09 In the 12 regional sections of this report we focus on the measures we will continue to report from 2008–09 onwards. These are audience, customer satisfaction and our ELTO measure.

From 2008 we will measure the impact of what we do over a longer period of time, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data of customer experiences after our engagement with them. Evidence will track progress towards larger and more strategic changes that have made a difference to individuals, institutions and their understanding of the UK. This will be supportive of overall public diplomacy reporting following recommendations in the Carter review.

Performance scorecard reporting in 2008–09 will be in the context of the new programme areas described in the Chief Executive’s introduction.