Your evaluation should bring together all the evidence that tells the story of your project and compares its initial aims with its outcomes. To show how your project changed things, you’ll need to gather information before it starts and after it finishes. Evaluation should begin early, while you are still planning the project. Here are some of the areas you should think about.
Numbers and stories
What sort of information do you need? Figures are useful, like visitor numbers, or the numbers of families or other groups involved in your project. The other numbers we are interested in are to do with the volunteers who worked on your project, and any people who received training. Keep track of these figures – but remember that they won’t tell the whole story.
You’ll need to talk to people who are directly involved in the project and those it reaches in other ways. Start by finding out what people expect of your project. Afterwards, ask them how it changed things. Keep a record of what people tell you, and put together a sample of responses. Some clear themes will probably emerge.
Start by finding out what people expect of your project. Afterwards, ask them how it changed things
Be clear about how you will measure your project’s success. Counting how many people took part is fairly straightforward, but there are many other aspects that can be included in your evaluation, like participants’ or visitors’ experiences. Look for quality as well as quantity. Sometimes the numbers may not be incredibly high, but the project may have made a big difference to the people who got involved. Ask them what they think.
If you set out to reach particular groups, you’ll need evidence to show whether or not your project achieved this. If your project didn’t meet all its aims, your evaluation is still very useful – it could help you and others to be more successful next time.
The right tools for the job
Depending on the scale of your project, there are various approaches to evaluation. A tool that we have found works well with HLF projects is Proving and improving: A quality and impact toolkit for social enterprise. This is a step-by-step toolkit devised by nef (the new economics foundation). You can access it at
www.proveandimprove.org/new.
The toolkit includes two particularly useful exercises, Storyboard and Poster Evaluation. The Storyboard exercise can help with planning your project. It brings together a group of ‘stakeholders’ – people who are involved with the project or will be affected by it. The group discusses why the project is important, what it aims to achieve, and how it will do this.
Be clear about how you will measure success. Look for quality as well as quantity
Poster evaluation can be done both while your project is underway and after it has finished. This is a group activity based around a large interactive poster with a project timeline. It offers people the opportunity to reflect on what the project has achieved and what can be learned from it. In the following pages, we talk to people involved in different heritage projects about how evaluation works in practice.