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Planning an evaluation

To make sure your evaluation is meaningful, making a detailed plan is essential.

What makes an evaluation 'meaningful' ?

An evaluation is meaningful if it is focused on supporting those working with and for young people to learn something about their practice that helps them to get (even) better at what they do.

Let’s start at the beginning: what brings you here?

Maybe you’re a youth worker who’s been asked to come up with a plan for how you are going to demonstrate the difference your organisation’s work makes to young people’s lives. You might need this for a funding application, or perhaps you already have the funding, and now you need to translate your plans into action. Or, you may already do quite a bit of evaluation within your organisation, but you now want to review it to understand whether it really meets your needs. 

Alternatively, you may be a funder or commissioner looking for ideas for the evaluation of a particular fund or activity, or inspiration on how to frame capacity building support for the youth organisations you support

Whatever the context, the most important thing is that evaluation should provide actionable insights for practice

These are ‘aha’ moments, where you observe something in practice, receive feedback from young people, or spot a trend in your data that leads you to identify a clear, achievable way in which you could do things differently. If your learning and evaluation process is not providing you with actionable insights, it’s not working for you as it should. 

We have developed freely available guidance and resources to support you and your colleagues to plan an evaluation which will work for you. 

This process begins with asking good questions to develop a theory of change - visit our resource library to get started.

If you have more questions about the Centre and how we work, visit our FAQ.

 

 

 

Related projects

Impact Accelerator

The Impact Accelerator is an intensive, 12-month programme for organisations that are committed to getting (even) better at what they do.