Evaluation Programme

Northern Rock Foundation’s Evaluation Programme  2011/2
We aim to ‘support the organisations we work with to be better able to demonstrate their value and impact’. In response to requests from our grant holders we have launched a series of half day evaluation workshops to compliment our existing ‘Learning from your Grant’ sessions. The seminars planned for 2011/2 are:

Success! Improving progress measurement in one-to-one working – 6 July 2011 & 23 February 2012
This workshop session aims to share the progress and impact measurement tools originally developed by Prof. Kerry Young for one-to-one working with young people. The tools are designed to help capture a range of ‘soft outcomes’ – that is the qualitative improvements to people’s lives that result from their involvement in a project. These are usually seen as being difficult to demonstrate and report.

This session provides  information about the tools available and an opportunity to try out one of the tools developed. It includes a demonstration by an organisation currently funded by the Foundation and allows discussion of the challenges and the advantages of the tools available in helping individuals see their own progress and in demonstrating to funders and commissioners the impact of work in one-to-one projects

Click here for the presentation & tools from the Juy 2011 session.

Click here for the presentations and tools from the February 2012 session.

Choosing the right evaluation tools - October & December 2011 As part of an ESRC funded project, Newcastle University have designed a ‘decision making tool’ to help organisations choose an appropriate and proportionate approach to measuring the quality and impact of their work. The project used the NEF ‘Proving and Improving’ toolkit as a starting point, simplifying and demystifying the range of possible approaches to make it more relevant to a broad range of VCO’s rather than just the larger Social Enterprises. This session provides an opportunity for organisations to look at the pro’s and con’s of the more widely used quality and evaluation tools and to work through the decision making tool to identify the most appropriate approach for their organisation and their target audiences.

Click here for the presentation from the December seminar & worksheet.

Demonstrating Impact and Value – 12 July 2012
Building on recent work from New Philanthropy Capital and the Center for Evaluation Innovation, this session explores a range of simple ways to capture and demonstrate the value and impact of the types of organisations the Foundation works with. The session focuses on capturing the ‘so what’ of projects including the importance of having clear objectives, understanding what success will look like, capturing feedback from beneficiaries and stakeholders and ways of presenting information effectively. The session also includes discussion of the pro’s and con’s of a wide range of approaches to capturing value and impact including case studies, feedback analysis, using intermediate outcomes measures, Social Audit and SROI including sharing examples of the approaches in practice and a workshop with an organisation currently funded by the Foundation.

Click here for the presentation from the July workshop.