Our aim is to help inform your project or organisation’s development by making your evaluations
- More meaningful – easier for you, and the people you work with, to learn from
- More manageable – less complicated, burdensome and costly
- More representative – telling your story from different perspectives
In practice, this can include simply giving one or two days support with your own self-evaluation; undertaking independent evaluation of your programme; or supporting bespoke action research projects. Please note we are very selective about the external evaluations we take on, undertaking only three or four each year. We select clients and contracts that actively seek learning, change and improvement; recognise the difference between evaluation and PR; and plan ahead. Contact us to discuss your needs.
Examples
Evaluation consultancy: Supporting organisations to develop manageable evaluation systems
- Alcohol Focus Scotland, Place for Hope, Victim Support Scotland and others: Developing coherent evaluation systems for measuring and reporting on new strategic plans.
- Paths for All, Creative Scotland, Cycling UK, Impact Funding Partners and others: Helping funders to develop robust but proportionate processes for evidencing and reporting impact.
Independent external evaluation: with a particular interest in ‘proof of concept’ evaluations for innovative services and pilot projects
- Community Brokerage Network: Evaluation of and recommendations for the development of brokerage within Self-Directed Support
- Barnardo’s: End of project evaluation for an employability project. Implementing the report’s recommendations subsequently helped secure new project funding
- In Control Scotland: Evaluation of NHS Highland trial of Individual Service Funds
- Scottish Waterways Trust: Three year evaluation following the journey of canal college, a trailblazing heritage and employability project. As well as a traditional evaluation report, we also created this visual summary.
Creative evaluation: We have trained hundreds of organisations in creative and participatory approaches to evaluation.
We also believe in making evaluation reports interesting and accessible, with examples available via this link including:
- Stafford Centre, Edinburgh: Evaluation report in the form of a magazine that folds out to become a poster for displaying in the Centre and at events
- Creative Scotland: Training participatory arts projects in creative evaluation and facilitating ‘learning exchange’ workshops to generate knowledge in preparation for project reporting.