Evaluations

We undertake evaluations to help our clients identify what works including a focus on strengths and areas for development. Our evaluations can be:

• Real-time: especially useful for innovative projects or service re-design, we provide real-time and rapid-cycle feedback on performance enabling teams to adapt in light of new information.
• Formative: providing evaluation of services or programmes at implementation milestones to support practice and outcomes improvement.
• Summative: providing evaluation near the end of project or programme, helping to take-stock on progress achieved and supporting judgements about future delivery.

We are skilled at a range of evaluation approaches including: theory-driven, theory-led, realist, contribution analysis, and experimental and quasi-experimental designs (see the section on RCTs and QEDs for more information).

We support clients formulate research questions, develop and refine theories of change and logic models and produce accessible evaluation frameworks and plans that ensure all partners understand how success in implementation, process and impact will be demonstrated. We also advise on the most appropriate evaluation designs, approaches and methods that will address our clients’ key questions.

We specialise in mixed-method evaluations. This means that we like to deploy a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to best explore different aspects of a programme and its impact, and to triangulate findings. We seek to understand: what works for whom, how and in what circumstances. Finally, as well as understanding ‘if’ things work, we like to understand ‘why’ they work and to test the theories or hypotheses behind them.

Clients typically ask us to undertake four different types of evaluation:

• Feasibility studies: understanding the extent to which a project or programme can be evaluated and how this should best be set-up.

• Process and implementation evaluations: helping to understand the extent to which a project or programme has been set-up and implemented successfully, including understanding factors enabling or inhibiting its success.

• Impact evaluation: understanding the extent to which a project and programme has achieved its objectives and has had a positive impact for the people it is designed to support.

• Economic evaluation: understanding whether projects or programmes offer value for money, are cost-effective, have a positive cost-benefit analysis, or provide a positive social return on investment.

A large portion of the projects or programmes that we evaluate are complicated or complex interventions which are being introduced into complex systems and which seek to have impact on the system as whole. We are able to factor-in systems thinking to ensure that we account for this and provide valuable insight.

Increasingly our clients are looking for greater certainty about the scale and nature of any impact that is being achieved. As a result, we are working on a number of evaluations that involve methodologies such as randomised control trials and quasi-experimental designs. See below for further information.