How to Evaluate - York Consulting

Oldham and Rochdale HMREvaluation Techniques “How to Evaluate”went through the process. Often when evaluation activity is focussed at theend of the project people can forget issues that arose and successes theyexperienced throughout the project’s lifetime. The emails were a usefulvehicle for the team to add additional reminders, prompts or requests –such as final evaluation activity.3.5 The monthly update emails also enabled the team to track lessons learntand explore how projects had grown and developed over time. They were agood source of information for real-time quotes and reflective learning.These monthly update emails are now being used in other studies theevaluation team are undertaking.3.6 Challenges: Although projects generally responded quickly and with littleprompting, there were some occasions when projects did not have the timeto complete the emails. This sometimes led to ad-hoc responses and gapsin information. Had this methodology been the only one employed, or hadresponses only been considered at the reporting stage, this would not havebeen as useful a tool. By acting on the information as it is emailed backinteresting points made by the projects in the update emails can be pickedup quickly. A short conversation with projects then can help to gatherfurther detail there and then, which can help to paint a fuller picture.Questionnaires3.7 Summary: The evaluation included pre and post questionnaires withrespondents for a number of the projects. The questionnaires weredesigned with the overarching evaluation and project objectives in mind andmeasured impact and distance travelled against these aims.3.8 Successes: Questionnaires were kept short and concise – often no longerthan 2-3 sides of A4. The evaluation wanted to keep individuals engageduntil the end of the questionnaire in order to get complete answers at allstages. The questionnaires provided some extremely useful data on36