Evaluation Support Scotland

Day

Tuesday 4 February

Time slot

09:30-10:30

Room

Moorfoot suite
Wheelchair accessible

Contact

Martha Lester-Cribb

Topic

Impact and evaluation

Overall aim

Through this event we aim to:

• introduce you to our 5 Principles for Good Evaluation,
• help you use them to check your evaluation is good enough for you,
• learn about your experience of putting them into practice so we can gather and share your top tips

Description

Is your evaluation good enough? Good enough for what? How can you tell?

People often come to ESS looking for a “robust evaluation matrix”. We can’t help. We’re not sure what that means. If anyone can tell us, we’re all ears!

People also come full of fear and trepidation – worried about outputs, objectives, aims, inputs, validated scales and the rest.

Some enquire about the evaluation gold standard. How to prove they’ve saved the NHS X bed days or kept someone out of prison? How much have they saved the state? Should they conduct randomised control trials? Surely external evaluation is best?

But self-evaluation isn’t social research. Your purpose is to make a difference, not to worry about perfect measurement. We believe evaluation can be fun and, perhaps, the reason to get out of bed in the morning!

We have distilled our learning from nearly 2 decades working with the sector into 5 Principles for Good Evaluation.

This workshop will help you use them to check your evaluation is good enough for you. And we want to learn about your experience of putting them into practice. (You’re probably already doing some of this unknowingly!)

We’ll explain the Principles and then you can: exchange ideas about how to apply them, think about any tweaks you might want to make to your own evaluation processes, and share your top tips with us. We’ll write these up and share them more widely.

NB: This isn’t evaluation training, but we will signpost to resources.

Who is the event aimed at?

Project/line managers

Who is speaking at this event?

Martha Lester-Cribb, Deputy CEO
Martha has worked in a range of roles in the third sector over more than 40 years. This included being part of the development of Talking Mats™ at the University of Stirling, co-founding Pass IT On (an IT reuse charity for people with disabilities) and being the Quality Officer at Befriending Networks. She has also learned about being in the role of funder by sitting on grants allocation panels for Shared Care Scotland. Martha moved to ESS in 2013 and enjoys working with organisations large and small in a range of different fields.