Evaluation

Are we reaching the people who most need our services? Do our methods demonstrate our key values, or inadvertently work against them? How do our users experience coming to us? It's too easy, in the intense experience of delivering services, to lose sight of the basic questions. Independent evaluation - of projects, training programmes, whole services - is increasingly seen as good practice in the not-for-profit sector. At the same time, most funders require an independent evaluation as a condition of support, and a thoughtfully produced evaluation report can be helpful in securing ongoing funding.

Ruth Valentine uses a variety of evaluation techniques, according to the service to be evaluated: semi-structured interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, simple quantitative measures and so on.

"What we got was deep understanding of what we do and of our client group. It really helps when someone can see beyond the constraints of a small project and is able to recognise the benefits of the work, that are not always easy to measure. Also, we were always confident our key clients, who are often very reluctant to be interviewed, would be approached and interviewed in a sensitive way." (project manager)

Contact Ruth if you need an external evaluator for a project or service you provide.