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!