Evaluation Experience: Settle Stories, Various Projects
As the Evaluator in Residence for Settle Stories, an arts organisation based in North Yorkshire, our director Kirsty Rose Parker is always coming up with experimental approaches to new projects; designing materials which capture outcomes around health and learning, and quality of arts experience. Recent evaluations include: The Settle Stories Digital Storytelling Festival (Executive summary attached); this evaluation was worth a total contract value of £1500 and was carried out over a relatively short period in 2018. The Evaluator planned the full evaluation, designing online questionnaires for artists and audiences and implemented a system of sticker-boards at key events during the festival. During the festival itself, The Evaluator managed a team of volunteers to ensure that the measures were implemented correctly and undertook some direct case studies with audience members. After the festival, The Evaluator and a further volunteer directly questioned local businesses to ensure a wide range of evidence was gathered. The Evaluator then analysed all the information together in order to create an infographic report, which is backed up by a full report.
View the infographic summary here
View the full report here
Evaluation Experience: Positive Progressions: a Building Better Opportunities Project
The Evaluator is the current provider of Evaluation Services for the Positive Progressions project running across Craven, Harrogate, Selby and York. This project is funded by Big Lottery and European Social Fund through the BBO Stronger Families project. This project has aims including Wellbeing, Confidence, Resilience and Work-readiness. The resilience and work-readiness methods have been developed by The Evaluator and are working very well. The data collected is used to create graphs of project averages, area averages and individual journeys. From this the project team can quickly identify what is working well; they can share these graphs with referral partners and convey the stories of challenging participants effectively to their funders.
During this project The Evaluator designed simple materials which participants filled out every three months – these were only two pages, and just tick box forms. In addition, staff filled out a simple assessment – as these staff worked 1:1 with participants they had a detailed understanding of the participants. These two assessments are cross referenced with the project enrolment forms and form the basis of the whole impact assessment. From these relatively simple tools, The Evaluator has been able to help the project become even more effective, identifying that the model works, as those who spend more time with their keyworkers have higher scores, and also picking up problem areas, for example, individuals with disabilities are seeing large gains in their softer skills but are not achieving as they should with the world of work. The project has been able to start some detailed work now looking at helping those with disabilities have more support.
Evaluation Experience: Up and Active SROI
The Evaluator has also recently completed a ‘Social Return on Investment’ for the Up & Active project which works across East Lancashire. An SROI is a robust framework for exploring the changes in people’s lives which was directly due to the work of Up and Active. It used values which correspond directly to the changes people told us about in their own words.
This ultimately showed that every £1 invested in Up and Active brought a social return on investment of £28. Up and Active have been able to use this information to clearly articulate the case for investment in the project and have made the front page of Leisure Opportunities with this impact assessment, helping to clearly position them as a successful project.