Girlguiding Scotland helps girls and young women in Scotland discover their full potential by having fun and enjoying new adventures.
ESS was commissioned to facilitate a tailored support session with 8 team members from Girlguiding Scotland.
The aim of the Tailored Support session was to ensure consistency in the teams understanding of evaluation basics, and help them learn about mapping project outcomes to strategic outcomes.
We also provided some helpful resources such as the embedding wheel from Making it Stick.
The group identified their evaluation challenges, including:
- Evaluation being done in isolation
- Outcomes not being “used”
- Being unsure about the difference between feedback and evaluation
What difference did we make?
After receiving Tailored Support Participants described themselves as being “clearer on how to evaluate the strategic plan” and seeing evaluation as something “for improvement and the bigger picture”.
To address the identified challenge of ‘Evaluation being done in isolation’ Girlguiding Scotland decided to have all team members involved in the session.
Learning about evaluating project outcomes helped them understand how these could map to strategic outcomes.
The group came up with new, more relevant, outcomes including:
“Volunteers feel more supported in their Girlguiding Scotland roles”.
What did we learn?
Encouraging an organisation to use everyday examples to set outcomes and indicators is a good way of helping them identify what matters for their evaluation.
Do you need help with your evaluation plan?
Our principles for good evaluation can help you to judge if you are happy with your evaluation. They are used within this story to highlight the principle that is being demonstrated:
– Good evaluation should be about what matters
See below for the case-study this story is based on, as well as resources mentioned:
Case Study: Girlguiding Scotland
This case study by Girlguiding Scotland is about how to embed evaluation across an organisation who are dependent on volunteers.
Making it stick – A guide to embedding evaluation
Guide for people who have a role in making sure that evaluation is embedded into everyday practice within an organisation.
ESS Evaluation Tool: Embedding Evaluation Wheel – Making it stick
This tool is designed to help organisations reflect on what in their organisation is helping make evaluation happen and what could be improved.
