Learning and evaluation
We can help you and the people you work with to understand and articulate the difference you make, and to learn while you develop or deliver.
Evaluation provides a foundation for effective learning and development, and helps demonstrate the impact of your organisation’s work. We deliver learning and evaluation projects for a wide range of organisations, from international and national charities to local community hubs. We are experienced learning partners, creating space for evaluative reflection throughout the life of projects or programmes. We work alongside you to understand your learning and evaluation needs. We can also provide an external evaluation perspective, helping you to gain new insights about your work and the difference it makes.
Our external evaluation work provides a robust assessment of the outcomes of your project or piece of work. This helps you to learn from experience and creates a baseline of evidence for future work. It can also help with understanding gaps in service provision or community need.
As well as undertaking evaluation work for you, we can support you to:
- Develop a theory of change for your project or organisation
- Build a meaningful and useful evaluation framework
- Train staff or volunteers on evaluation approaches, including participatory evaluation approaches
- Design engaging and innovative approaches to gather evaluative data.
Evaluation training: Measuring Change training for Big Locals
Local Trust commissioned Just Ideas and our partners WSA Community Consultants to develop and deliver practical and fun training that demystified evaluation for residents from Big Local areas across England: ‘How do we know we are making a difference?’
Our training sessions created space for participants to share their experience of measuring change and provided them with a theory of change framework to think through the vision for their community, to decide on indicators of success in moving towards this vision and to collect relevant evidence of change. 57 participants joined the courses we delivered in Birmingham, Bristol and York.
Developing their theory of change not only helped participants to show what they’ve achieved, but also to recognise what was working well and what they needed to do to move forward.
Learning Partners
Increasingly, we work with clients over the duration of a project or programme, co-producing evaluation frameworks, creating space for reflective learning and providing an impact evaluation. This approach benefits your project, as opportunities for active learning provide feedback that positively shapes the approach and results of your work.
Evaluation and learning partners: Local Trust's Community Leadership Academy
From 2020 to 2023 we worked in partnership with the Institute for Voluntary Action Research (IVAR) on Local Trust’s Community Leadership Academy (CLA). As evaluation and learning partners, we helped the CLA to learn about the difference it was making to participants, how it was working, and what was particularly effective through regular learning workshops. In August 2023, the final report of this work, ‘Building Community Leadership’ was published.
In our final year of work alongside the CLA, Just Ideas focused on the impact that the CLA had at individual and community level for its participants. We used an in depth case study approach – drawing on the experience of people in the wider Big Local partnerships and community organisations. The results of this work were published in our ‘Spheres of Community Influence’ report. We also facilitated a roundtable bringing together diverse experiences of community leadership from practitioners, CLA participants, funders, and national organisations to understand how best to support community leadership in future.
Big thanks from us for facilitating a great workshop. I know it wasn’t easy to get everyone thinking about both big-picture and practical stuff, and keep us thinking about that, and you managed really well.
(Feedback on the CLA roundtable facilitation)
Learning partners: Valuing the Ocean
We worked with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as learning partner and evaluator to its Valuing the Ocean programme (2017-19). The programme worked towards the conservation and sustainable management of the ocean for the wellbeing of people now and in future – it hypothesised that people will act to protect what they value, and that to bring about significant change we need an ecosystem of organisations with different skills and interests working together. Our role as critical friends involved facilitation, research and evaluation over an eighteen month period with the final report feeding into future priorities as the programme looked towards the UN Ocean conference.