These workshops are designed to teach third sector organisations how to evaluate their work. They can be commissioned and delivered to a group of staff within a single organisation, either in-person or online. Intermediaries, funders and local authorities can also commission us to run workshops for their members or funded organisations.
Let’s Evaluate
Let’s Evaluate! is a three-part training programme designed to help third sector organisations demonstrate the difference they make. This course works well for people with different amounts of experience of self-evaluation, including people who are brand new to it. We would encourage people to attend all three parts of the workshop and in order.
Part 1: Getting Started: Setting outcomes and indicators
This stimulating workshop will explain what outcomes and indicators are and how they can be used to help explain the difference your work makes. It will give you clarity on the building blocks of evaluation while providing time for you to apply them to your own projects.
At this workshop you will learn how to:
- Understand the importance of outcomes and indicators
- Write clear outcomes for your project / organisation
- Set indicators to help measure whether you are achieving your outcomes
Part 2: Make to Measure: Evaluation methods and plans
Explore the questions and processes involved in choosing the best methods for your project including looking at sources of evidence, the level of user involvement the tool can provide, and keeping evaluation proportionate to your resources.
This creative workshop which follows on from ‘Getting started: Outcomes and indicators’ shows you what evaluation methods to use and how to make a monitoring and evaluation plan.
At this workshop you will learn how to:
- Understand the steps and principles to follow when choosing or developing evaluation methods
- Use different methods and tools to collect information about your outcomes
- Put in place a monitoring and evaluation plan for your project/organisation
Part 3: Telling my Story: Analysing and reporting on outcomes
This informative workshop investigates how to pull together evidence and make sense of it, even though it might be coming from different places and consist of different types of data! You will gain the latest understanding of best practice in reporting and explore what a positive funder relationship looks like.
Using evaluation for learning is just as important as using it to provide outcome evidence for your funders and this workshop examines how your evaluation practice can achieve both and more.
At this workshop you will learn how to:
- Analyse information collected to evidence the achievement of your project outcomes
- Report on the achievement of project outcomes to funders and stakeholders
- Learn from the analysis to improve project delivery
Contact us to commission our Let’s Evaluate! programme
Supporting small organisations with the basics of self-evaluation
Are you funding or running a programme with small, community projects that are entirely new to self-evaluation and need help to get started with simple evaluation systems?
If so, you can commission us to provide two half-day, online workshops for those small groups that cover the very basics of good evaluation.
Part 1 will cover outcomes, indicators and evaluation methods
Part 2 will cover analysis and reporting
You can commission part 1 on its own or both parts together (but not part 2 alone).
Contact us to commission our basics of self-evaluation workshops
Further topic specific workshops
View our topic specific workshops:
Theory of change workshop: An Introduction to Logic Modelling
This workshop introduces you to logic models to:
- Plan and evaluate their work
- Manage complexity when planning projects, e.g. calculating the impact of multiple projects or complex interventions
- Link local outcomes to national or higher-level outcomes
Contact us to commission our theory of change workshop
Not just a story workshop: Making use of experiences in evaluation
As part of our everyday work, we hear about many people’s experiences of their lives, what’s important and how they experience services. In this workshop we will explore how we can make better use of that rich information to show we are making a difference, to improve our services and to feed into policy and system improvement in general. This means being more deliberate about collecting, analysing and reporting people’s experiences.
At the end of this workshop participants will be able to:
- Explain why and how people’s experiences and more qualitative feedback can be used in monitoring & evaluation
- Understand the difference between experiences and case studies
- Use simple methods to collect and record and analyse people’s experiences
- Review how you currently hear, record and use people’s experiences
Contact us to commission our not just a story workshop
Thrive Training
Thrive Training is a certified course designed to help practitioners understand more about how to use physical activity or sport to achieve a range of outcomes. The course involves 3 days’ worth of training over 3 months, with some additional work-based learning, and is particularly suited to those working full time in this field. This training is currently FREE to those in Scotland.
The Thrive Learning Programme was developed and delivered by Evaluation Support Scotland and Actify.
Click here to visit the Thrive Learning Programme website to book
Read more about our booking process, workshop costs, how our workshops will run, and our terms and conditions here.
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