Destinations - Evaluation

Our goal is to help you gather evidence that will stand up to independent scrutiny. We do this by using reliable evaluation techniques that will help demonstrate your project’s performance and impact. We also emphasise the positive learning lessons from your project in order to help shape its sustainable future and further development.

How do you prove that your project has worked? How do you demonstrate to others that all that effort was worthwhile and that it met expectations? How do you continually improve your project whilst it’s still happening and make changes with confidence?

The answer is independent evaluation. Something the Skyblue crew has been providing for the past two decades to our clients. These clients tell us that our expert assessments have helped them in two ways. Firstly, they provide credible evidence of a project’s performance and impact to their funding partners. Secondly, they help identify the way forward for a project including the best funding models to ensure those projects that are working well have the best opportunity of being continued and further improved.

Are you new to commissioning evaluation?

If you are someone relatively new to the commissioning evaluation the Skyblue crew will help you develop your own skills and capability right from the outset. Let us help you develop the evaluation brief so that you can be confident it’s going to meet all the expectations of those around you. Let us act as a sounding board for you when developing the evaluation framework and methodology. Let us share with you some of the good practice that guides us as professional evaluators – for example making best use of the guidance from the UK Evaluation Society – and help you select an evaluation approach that is going to work for you e.g. a formative approach (that means evaluation happens whilst your project is being delivered) or a summative approach (an assessment towards the end of your project) or a mixture of the two.

Got loads of experience in commissioning evaluation?

Many of our clients are our peers and therefore we respect their skills in being able to develop very structured and specific evaluation briefs. It’s a competitive business and we know we have to stay ahead to be given the opportunity to undertake exciting evaluation work with forward thinking clients. As evaluation professionals we do our utmost to keep on top of leading industry practice and methodologies (e.g. additionality logic chain and theory of change approaches). We are well versed in evaluation techniques that allow us to explore deadweight, leakage, additionality, displacement, substitution, multipliers and others as required. We have significant experience of providing programme and project specific evaluations, both summative and formative, lasting from as little as 3 months to 5 years for our clients and whilst no evaluation framework is precisely the same we are able to call on the significant experience and learning from having evaluated over 100 social and economic projects in the past 10 years.

Our Services

We offer summative and formative evaluation services that have been developed to meet our clients’ specific needs. From evaluation planning, to framework design, fieldwork implementation and expert analysis and assessment our approach is always to tailor the right evaluation methodology for your project mindful of your timescale and budgetary parameters. We have experience of evaluating programmes, projects, partnerships, networks and individual products or services. We evaluate performance, impact and sustainability as standard making best use of available management information and customer research. Our reports analyse the extent to which outputs, outcomes and strategic added value (SAV) have been achieved, and we routinely develop case studies and learning lesson workshops during the process to encourage continual improvement of your initiative. We offer a range of technical evaluation services in respect of ‘impact assessment’ including cost benefit analysis and return on investment. We are also well versed in evaluation techniques that allow us to explore deadweight, leakage, additionality, displacement, substitution, multipliers and others as required by our clients.

It’s too early to tell?

The phrase we fear most in the world as evaluators. It’s too early to tell? It is our primary goal to ensure that this phrase is never left unexplored in any evaluation we undertake for our clients. This is typically what you might hear when asking someone whether their use of your service or product has created a lasting change in behaviour. Clients always want to be able to demonstrate that their project has had a measurable impact on people or businesses but sometimes fail to recognise that some time needs to elapse after usage in order to capture this kind of intelligence. As part of the planning process with clients we advise them on the optimum timescale and approach to evaluation. In this way, we can manage expectations and collect evidence that has a genuine value and that has the potential to be turned into practical action in future.

Bringing the evaluation to life

Our service doesn’t end simply when an evaluation report is submitted. We encourage all our clients to think hard about how they will communicate the evaluation results and learning in their own organisation and to external customers. Where welcomed, we support that communication process with well written reports and briefings in a language to suit the user. The written word is one means of communication, but of course there are also many other exciting ways to bring evaluations to life through well structured events, evaluation workshops, good practice seminars, conferences, interactive websites, films, presentations and documentaries - all part of the Skyblue ‘creative’ service offer.

Suite C, 2nd Floor

The Lodge, 21 Front Street

Acomb, York

YO24 3BW

Tel 01904 340942

Tel 01904 343891

Fax 01904 343890

info@skyblue.org.uk

Company number: 6285696

VAT Registration: 911 3957 2