A few years back, I worked on a three year contract supporting organisational change in a group of universities who were starting to come to terms with a then brand new agenda, where academics and researchers needed to become more outwards facing, connecting with the public on their doorstep and at large. Part of my role was to mentor internal directors and project managers, and the departments they worked with, in looking for the impact of their activities. Like many major programmes, the initiative had a quite intense, technical, formal, robust evaluation system underpinning it. Like many organisations, this was not the fun part of anyone's work, and on top of everything else going on, was not generally what most people were interested in prioritising. In my mentoring role, I wanted to increase people's confidence about being able to carry out evaluation that was realistic and meaningful, and reduce their fear of becoming overwhelmed. At the same time, some of the community groups involved had been saying their previous experiences of evaluation in university programmes had, at times, been overwhelming, invasive, and one-sided.
​As a result, I created a simple, practical, set of suggestions to make evaluation do-able, useful, positive and meaningful. It simply offered these ten top tips, and five years later with the huge amount of learning I've developed about evaluation, they still absolutely stand the test of time...

1. Be Selective: stay focused – keep your aims and objectives in mind. Don’t try and capture everything about everything. 
2. Impact: always aim to answer these questions: What happened that wouldn’t otherwise have happened? What difference did it make – to us and to our participants, partners or colleagues? What did we learn from this? What do we intend to do next?
3. Achievability: think about what’s realistic and achievable with the resources you have, this may mean you select only one thing to explore in depth, and a few other areas to cover briefly. 
4. Breadth and depth: include quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative methods lead to facts and figures; qualitative methods capture experiences and personal impacts. 
5. Varied questioning: use open and closed questions. Closed questions allow you to create statistics to show particular patterns of what’s happening. Open questions mean people can say what’s really important to them. 
6. Bespoke and appropriate: every project or event is unique. Create methods that work for you and your partners/participants.  Think about what will make it easy for people to complete any evaluation requests and, where appropriate, make it fun and integrate it into the main activity of your work. 
7. Combined approaches: where possible combine a range of evaluation methods and techniques. This will allow you to cross-reference your findings to develop a clearer understanding of what is happening. 
8. People-centred: Remember to explain to participants why you are collecting the information and be mindful of protecting private information. 
9. Analysis: analyse the information you have.  Statistics and conclusions are just the start, keep going until you know why is that important? What does it show or prove?  
10. Applying the understanding: use your evaluation. Tell people what you found out and the lessons you have learned. Consider how it will inform future plans and strategies going forward.  Reflect on how you might do things differently next time.

There are some things I've thought it would be good to do for a long time, but it's never been part of my paid work to do them, and so they haven't got done. I'm noting them here as a reminder to myself and an invitation to anyone who is interested, to commission me to do  them, and share them freely and publicly (or at least under creative commons) for the wider benefit of those who can use them:

1. A list of what managing, researching and evaluating many projects has taught me about partnership - what it does or doesn't mean, what it looks like, the different shapes it takes, the benefits, challenges, pitfalls, successes, opportunities and more

2. A top ten of findings / recommendations that arise in my evaluation work. Mostly around the process of managing projects - resources, processes, staffing, communication, planning, sustainability and legacy - those sorts of things. There are so many shared benefits and challenges I see time and time again, to the point it makes me sad that these things have to be learned afresh each time with publicly funded activity. Wouldn't it be better if we can do more learning from each other and move things on?

3. A portfolio of what creative consultation / creative evaluation can look like - examples of things I've tried myself and examples that other people have developed in their work.

There might be more to this list of lists but these are the freshest in my mind just now. So if you can't afford a specialist consultant for these things, do keep popping back, maybe one day someone will have commissioned them from me and they will be available to you for free.

An introduction to evaluation with some examples of how to avoid too much form-filling and tick-boxing, thank goodness.