Simple evaluation you can do yourself – Three tips to do your own evaluation

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Sometimes we get asked to quote for projects and the project is quite small, or the project team is quite small. They don’t have a large budget and although we’re always great value for money, sometimes it’s better to spend the money on delivery.

Our Director, Kirsty, used to run small projects like this and always carried out her own evaluation. She used this knowledge to create ‘The Evaluator’ and wanted to put together a guide for someone who has got a bit of public funding and a small project (maybe £50,000 or less).

If your project is small we recommend you do your own evaluation. There are always exceptions to the rule however and sometimes the project has a strong learning objective, which makes an evaluation particularly appropriate, but as a guide – that’s what we’d recommend.

Say you are running a project and you’ve got, for example  £35,000 worth of funding -how would you attempt to evaluate that? There are some really very simple things that you could do, as follows:

Idea 1: Have an internal focus group.

For example, you might put a meeting together and the three or four people who have been running the project and working on most of the tasks, might sit down and answer these three questions:

What went really well?

What surprised you about the people taking part?

What would you do differently?

Just that alone – having a discussion and applying it, is a really good start.

Idea 2: Mini data analysis.

You keep a note of attendance at events and look to see which days are busiest and do more of them.

Idea 3: Mini research interviews.

Ask the people taking part what they have enjoyed the most – then plan to repeat that for new people.

The important thing is to not see ‘evaluation’ as a big scary thing, but to see it as ‘how can we use the knowledge or information we have to improve’.

Good luck!

Meet Our Intern – Nadia

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Nadia stands in front of the Sydney opera house at night with a dark blue sky My name is Nadia and I am excited to announce myself as the newest intern here at The Evaluator.

A bit about me: I’m currently studying Economics at the University of Liverpool, where I’ve developed an interest in Data analytics and statistics.

This internship presents an incredible opportunity for me to dive deeper into my interest of data analytics and apply the theoretical knowledge I’ve gained in a practical setting. What appeals to me about The Evaluator specifically is their core value of being creatively simple, I think the focus of anyone who handles data should be to ensure that any data can be easy enough for the average person to understand and useful enough that it can help them view their project or business in a way they may not have before.

Outside of studying my interests include music, film and travelling. In fact, I recently just spent 6 months living and travelling in Australia. I spent a semester studying in Melbourne and the rest of my time travelling across the east coast – I think my favourite memory from travelling abroad would be getting to go to the Melbourne Grand prix and meeting Daniel Riccardo as I’m a big fan of his. That or being chased by a possum was a fun memory also.

During my internship with The Evaluator my goal is to develop my data and report writing skills, both of which I feel I have already made a start on in the 2 months since I have been here. I’m excited to go forward and see what the new year has in store and I can’t wait to see what I can learn from Kirsty and the team.

 

Evaluation in Action: This is Nelson facilitation

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Reflection sessions can be a really important part of the package that we offer to clients, in terms of evaluation services.

Encouraging people to think back and spend a little time being in a more reflective state of mind can be a great way to improve your work over time. Having discussions about what has gone well, what could be done better and bouncing ideas off your peers and colleagues can reveal some great next steps.

One example is the facilitation we carried out recently for a town deal project. We went to a beautiful venue in the hills and had an ‘away day’ with the whole team. It was very helpful to bring together people who work at all different levels of their organisations. In fact, on this day, it wasn’t just people from all different levels but people from three different key organisations who came together.

At this session we asked ‘what do we know now that we didn’t know a year ago?’ This question can help people to understand their learning during the work they have been doing.

The day helped to:

  • Reflect
  • Reinforce what they knew
  • Build relationships
  • Plan new work together

Some of the most important decisions that came out of that day were really simple. In fact,  the partnership was taking over a new venue and hoped to all work from that venue one morning a week. Two of the organisations had chosen a morning and, on the day, it was realised that it was not a good fit for all three organisations and so a simple shift, right at the beginning, before it got bedded into diaries, would make a big difference to that project.

There were other really important improvements made, such as deciding together ‘how often shall we have a conversation?’ and ‘should it be on slack or more formal?’ ‘How do we keep in touch? Little and often?’(Rather than it being big, planned meetings) and ‘how can we coordinate programming more effectively?’

You don’t always know what’s going to come out of a reflection session but encouraging other people who are taking part in the program, to listen to other people’s thoughts and reflections, gives ideas some space to bounce around and improve.

When we facilitate something like this, we also spend a lot of time making sure that everyone gets a chance to use their voice. There is a concept of the HIPPO voice being the most often heard (Highest Paid Person in The Organisation) and the more senior people tend to be better at speaking up.

As passionate devotees to democracy we also want to hear from people who are more junior or merely just shy in general. Their knowledge and life experiences are really valuable.

The way we go about this is we plan a lot of activities and games which not only make the day fun and make time pass quickly, but they also give everyone a chance to speak.

Our facilitation days do get booked up quite quickly so if you are looking for an evaluation to include every voice – please get in touch.

New Client: Heritage Crafts

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The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, Heritage Crafts.

Heritage Crafts is the national charity for traditional heritage crafts in the UK. Working in partnership with the government and key agencies, they provide a focus for craftspeople, groups, societies and guilds – as well as individuals who care about the loss of traditional crafts skills. They work towards a healthy and sustainable framework for the future.

Heritage Craft’s charitable purpose is to advance public knowledge and appreciation of traditional and heritage crafts in particular, but not exclusively, through education, advice and training.

They describe themselves as:

“Heritage Crafts is the national charity for traditional heritage crafts. Working in partnership with Government and key agencies, we provide a focus for craftspeople, groups, societies and guilds, as well as individuals who care about the loss of traditional crafts skills, and work towards a healthy and sustainable framework for the future.

We are a UNESCO accredited NGO for Intangible Cultural Heritage and advocated for UK ratification of the 2003 UNESCO Convention of the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which was announced by the UK Government in December 2023.”

Shaping a Resilient Future for Heritage Crafts is a project designed to build the resilience of the organisation. Heritage Crafts has grown rapidly over the last four years and is also at the end of a period of change – moving from trustee led to having paid staff.

This project will run for two years and is funded through the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It will focus on governance, fundraising and broadening the offer of support to a wider range of people, including under-represented communities.

The Evaluator is looking forward to working with and evaluating the Shaping a Resilient Future for Heritage Crafts project.

You can find out more about the organisation here https://www.heritagecrafts.org.uk/

NEW CLIENT: APPLE DAY

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The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, Apple Day.

The Apple Day project is being run by Larksfoot CIC (Community Interest Company) who are based in the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The CIC operated out of Leighton Hall.

You can see more about Larksfoot here and more about Leighton Hall here.

The project is an educational programme centred around the heritage of Apple Day.

Apple Day was initiated by Common Ground (you can read more here) on 21 October 1990 at an event in Covent Garden, London, and has been celebrated in each subsequent year.

Common Ground describe the day as a way of celebrating and demonstrating that variety and richness matter to a locality and that it is possible to affect change in your place. Common Ground has used the apple as a symbol of the physical, cultural and genetic diversity we should not let slip away. In linking particular apples with their place of origin, they hope that orchards will be recognized and conserved for their contribution to local distinctiveness, including the rich diversity of wildlife they support.

Apple Day being celebrated in October is connected to how August – November is usually the biggest time of year for apples, during the autumn season, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.

The team at Larksfoot are working with groups of children aged 4 to 11 who will take part in educational activities, regarding apples, linking back to the Victorian heritage of the site. At the end of the programme there will be a celebrational day that links to the 20th of October Apple Day, which historically used to be important in the AONB North Pennine area.

We are looking forward to evaluating the outcomes, which are targeted around enjoyment, play, fun and heritage and will also encourage people from lower income backgrounds to participate.

 

NEW CLIENT: ADDERS UP

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The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client -Adders Up.

Based in the North Pennines Area of National Beauty, this three-year project is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Northumbrian Water Branch Out Fund.

Adders, also known as Vipera berus, are a crucial part of the ecosystem.  Like many species, they face numerous threats from habitat loss, climate change, and human activities. The North Pennines National Landscape team, running the project, work to conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the area and will use their expertise to carry out activities designed to protect a species under threat. A recent survey that monitored adder sites across the UK, suggested that all small adder populations could be extinct by 2032.

Using groups that have the same landscape in common – such as walkers, runners, bird watchers and photographers, the project will raise awareness of Adder habitats and misconceptions, helping them to thrive. The project will also develop community events to promote the conservation of adders across various mediums, involving Volunteers, Artists, Landowners, Farmers, Vets and also Parents and Children to learn, share and disseminate knowledge which supports the conservation of the land and the species.

The Adders Up project hopes to change attitudes towards the adder through conservation and engagement activities and also events (open to all) and will focus on nature recovery and helping people to make an emotional connection with nature.

We are looking forward to evaluating the impact that this project has on people’s attitudes to conservation and the adders themselves.

You can find out more about the Adders Up project and how to get involved here.

NEW CLIENT: PRESTON PARK

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The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new project and a new client – Preston Park Museum. This House Sparks Joy: Decluttering Preston Park Museum is a heritage project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, as part of their ‘Dynamic Collections’ initiative. The project involves moving objects from an offsite store to a new onsite open store, where the public can view the ‘behind the scenes’ processes of cleaning, conservation, and preparation. It also focuses on developing a sustainable approach to rationalising the collection, which encourages community input into decision-making about objects.

The reason this project is called This House Sparks Joy is that it is inspired by the Marie Kondo book –  The Magic of Tidying Up. This book explains how individuals can declutter their homes by only keeping the things that spark joy.

Now imagine all of that being translated to a museum. In fact, museums cannot keep everything forever because storing items requires not only care and attention but also mending, regular checks, cleaning and much  more behind the scenes than you may think.

So how do you make choices about what to keep, what to display and what to move on? How do you make sure that those difficult choices are made, whilst also listening to the voices of your community?

“Preston Park Museum & Grounds has been awarded £237,000 of National Heritage Lottery Funding as part of the Dynamic Collections Project. Thanks to National Lottery players, we are able reshape and improve the management of Preston Park Museum’s collection, whilst also evolving to meet the changing needs of the communities around us, and to reflect more people’s history and experiences.

The two-year project will help bring hundreds of unseen local objects, on display, in an interactive and visible store. Preston Park Museum currently has over 100,000 objects in its collection, with less than ten percent on display for public viewing. Working hard behind the scenes to uncover and bring to life the stories of the people and objects from across the Tees Valley, is over 35 volunteers.”

The museum explains.

You can read more about the project here

DATA DRIVEN DECISIONS

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June is a busy month for our team as it is when we make all the data-driven decisions for the National Portfolio Organisations (NPO) funded by the Arts Council.

We offer an affordable service to help organisations collect all the data they need during the year for the Arts Council. We also help them import it into the funder’s portal, which opens between April and June. Whilst we are then  assembling all of the data, ready to fill in the portal, we analyse and report on all the data for the organisations, to enable them to make data-driven decisions. This is when we bring the data to life. Our data-driven decisions take the form of a team presentation followed by a report. We share trends shown over time, outputs, audience information and artist voices. We anonymise and share any staff issues and also provide staff and board demographic profiles. We look at ideas and spaces where organisations could shout about the great work they are doing (or do more of) alongside ways to improve. Some include practical operational tips to make sure organisations are using their limited resources and limited staffing in the best possible way, i.e. the most efficient way. The beauty of these presentations is that they are data-led and we don’t know what we will find until we analyse the information.

What is an NPO? The Arts Council explains “National Portfolio Organisations are leaders in their areas, with a collective responsibility to protect and develop our national arts and cultural ecology. Public investment brings public accountability, for us and for the organisations we invest in, and this is reflected in our expectations.”

Organisations do have to be accountable in terms of detailed data. It can be quite tricky to understand the requirements too, for example, in 2024/2025 there have been a lot of changes, with the launch of a new system for one part of data collection, called ‘Illuminate.’

The Evaluator has been offering this service for a number of years, and our NPO cohort has grown significantly since 2023. We love working with arts organisations to make sure we figure it out for them. The Arts Council is keen for organisations to use their own data more, so it’s a win-win relationship.

Are you  an NPO organisation who has recently been through a challenging time in finding data, assembling the right information and putting all your data into the portal when it opened? If so then why not give us a call? We might be able to help you and it is much better value than you might expect. In fact, our packages have a standard cost of £2,400 plus VAT each year. You can call us on 01756 532 538 or email info@theevaluator.co.uk

If you are interested in this idea but are not quite sure you want to talk yet, then why not join our mailing list?

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We only mail out about 3 newsletters per year, so you definitely won’t feel bombarded, but it is a great way to keep in touch and learn about our approach to evaluation and data in general.

VISIT IN PERSON: WE INVENTED THE WEEKEND

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We were lucky enough to be invited to evaluate the ‘We Invented the Weekend’ festival at Salford Quays in June 2024. The festival is busy! It attracts thousands of visitors and has; performances, tents, music, shopping, sports, boats, cyclists, dancers, parades, talks – you name it and it is probably taking place across the site. Evaluating something like this requires a lot of energy and luckily The Evaluator has been honing its festival approach for many years now. We don’t often get to work next to celebrities like Bluey and Supertato though! Not forgetting the Gladiators and Mr Motivator!

You can read more about the We Invented The Weekend festival here.

four colourful textiles with the letters W I T W in a grid

We worked with an amazing team of volunteers and two giant dice to collect feedback at the weekend festival. We are very proud to say that across two sites, with a really small evaluation team, we were able to collect almost 500 completed feedback surveys during the weekend itself. We also created a brand-new game which worked really well, involving a giant dice and questions which aligned to the dice roll. This means that we have really good results across a wide cross section of people, great sample sizes and very good data.

 

photogragh of Salford Quays which shows tall buildings and blue skies next to water with people walking

Whilst there, we also carried out extensive footfall counting, to allow us to create a robust estimate of footfall over the whole weekend.

Our surveys are still live for this project and we are looking forward to collecting and analysing all the data over the summer months.

You might spot us at the next couple of festivals we are working on; these are ‘The Festival of Culture’ in Nelson in June and also ‘The National Festival of Making’ in July.

You can see more about The Festival of Culture here, and you can see more about The National Festival of Making here.

We actually evaluate the number of festivals and are happy to come along and support data collection if needed. Our festival analysis includes audience profiles, quality measures, practical experience and ways to improve, alongside footfall and economic impact. We would be happy to have a chat if you have a festival, that you would like to know more about, evaluating. You can call us on 01756 532 538 or email: info@theevaluator.co.uk

Pendle Business Award Finalist

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The Evaluator is delighted to be a finalist in the 2024 Pendle Business Awards for the category Social Responsibility.

 

Graphic is black with white text saying we are proud to be a 2024 finalist

We take our social responsibility very seriously, championing inclusion and diversity for example. We always work hard to make sure that all the projects and activities we evaluate include as many people as possible.

We also work on a lot of environmental projects and are a sustainable team. We minimise commuting by working from home, expect for once a week office days. Our director’s commute is walking to walk! We avoid single use plastic, and hardly use any consumables as a business.

We are a philanthropic team, our director, Kirsty, volunteers for her local secondary school as the school’s strategic careers lead, and our people specialist, Bronwen is also a trained hedgehog rescuer!

We are an ethical organisation, where we make decisions as a team. We even have an ethical query resolution process which is worked through step by step.

And, last but absolutely not least, we are passionate about wellbeing. We delivered the groundbreaking wellbeing project, ‘72 Seasons’ in 2020. This involved getting more than 300 people to rewrite the seasons with us to create an agreed set of nature seasons, to help people connect more with nature as it sits on their doorstep. Since then we continue to share the seasons online and the community of seasonal seekers has now grown to almost 2,000 people. You can see more about the 72 Seasons project here. 

This is all in addition to our operational activity which looks at social responsibility day in and day out! We are delighted to be finalists along with two other amazing organisations; Domiciliary Home Care Services and VS Group.