Increasing demand and more competition for funds mean it’s more important than ever to be able to demonstrate the impact of your hard work.
But evaluation isn’t just about accountability, it should also help you learn, adapt and improve your service.
To help demonstrate your impact and reflect on your learning we’ve employed a dedicated evaluation expert to support you with all aspects of evaluation.
It doesn’t matter what your area of work is, we can support you to carry out effective evaluations that demonstrate the impact of your work and show the difference you're making to people’s lives.
Why is evaluation important?
Effective evaluation helps us measure the impact of a service or intervention and provides evidence of the positive changes you’re making to people’s lives.
It can also help us learn, by exploring what’s working well, what needs changing and what really matters to people using your service.
Evaluation is important for accountability, transparency and learning, and can help to justify decisions about funding and resources.
Our evaluation support
We can support you in every aspect of evaluation. This could mean helping you understand the process, supporting you to identify the changes you’re trying to make, or exploring which evaluation approaches are best for you.
We’re developing a package of support for people working in social care that’s free and open to all. This includes:
- a series of accessible online training sessions to ‘demystify’ evaluation
- one-to-one tailored evaluation support for people working in social care.
We’re also working on creating:
- bitesize evaluation training videos to support frontline social care workers
- resources and tools that support people working in social care to carry out evaluations.
Online training sessions
Together with our colleagues at DEEP we’ve put together several sessions to help ‘demystify’ evaluation and give you the confidence to carry out or commission evaluations yourself.
Our evaluation training is for anyone who works in social care but it’s ideal for individuals involved in areas like project management, performance and improvement, research and development, impact and funding.
There are five sessions in each series.
- Demystifying evaluation: an introduction.
- Using ‘a story of change’ to measure impact.
- Ethics and evaluation.
- An introduction to economic evaluation.
- Creativity and participation in evaluation.
Book your place
If you’re interested in taking part in our training sessions, you can book through this Eventbrite link.
Please note that spaces are limited so it’s best to book as soon as possible to guarantee your place.
If you can’t make our latest sessions, we’ll be running the training twice a year and changing the times and days to try and make them accessible for everyone. We’ll update this page with new information and training dates as they become available.
One to one support for your evaluation questions
We’re also offering year-round one to one support to help individuals working in social care overcome specific challenges around evaluation. You don’t need to attend one of our training sessions to access this support and we’ll do our best to help with whatever challenge you’re facing.
This support is available to anyone in social care who wants support to develop, carry out or learn about evaluations. Please contact our senior evaluation lead for more information on one to one support.
