How to Evaluate - York Consulting

Oldham and Rochdale HMREvaluation Techniques “How to Evaluate”Table 2.1 Benefits of the evaluation process Enhancing shared understanding – e.g. staff and stakeholder groups; Supporting programme delivery – build evaluation into delivery e.g.integrated monitoring, participants monitor own progress; Increasing engagement of stakeholders, residents and beneficiaries –participatory, self-evaluation, self-determination; Develop culture of a learning organisation for both projects andfunders/stakeholder agencies – individual organisational development; Extended learning – through sharing and disseminating best practiceand lessons learnt with other projects and organisations.Good Practice: Embedding Evaluation2.7 Evaluation works best when it is valued and demanded by both projects andstakeholders who recognise the benefit it can have in developing a learningculture within organisations. The collection of information does not need tobe additional to the standard information collected or a burden. Evaluationsdesigned ex-post (after the activity or project has already finished) canoften be expensive and time consuming to generate the necessaryinformation needed to evidence impact.2.8 Evaluation designed ex-ante (before the project starts, or whilst it is in itsearly development stages) has the opportunity to build these mechanismsinto individual programmes. The result is that information required forevaluation is generated on an on-going basis as part of project delivery.This is the approach taken to the Oldham and Rochdale HMR CohesionCounts Evaluation and it was shown to be more effective and less likely tomeet with resistance. The Cohesion Counts projects were aware of theinformation required from the very beginning and why it was important tobe collecting data and feedback as the project went along.2.9 It is possible to evidence impact ex-post; it relies on using secondaryevidence to baseline your findings or retrospectively asking beneficiaries to11