Learning how to evaluate projects successfully is key for charities, especially when working with funders: whether grants, foundations, government or private sector. But beyond establishing a tick box metric of whether your project has failed or succeeded, there's a lot more to think about when carrying out a genuinely useful evaluation that can benefit you, your team and the planet. Lucy Anderson, our Head of Measurement and Evaluation, and Tessa Bartholomew-Good, Campaigns lead for our Clean Air programmes, talk about why they love evaluation so much, and what they want to learn more of.

"We Share Freely". The change we want to see in the world is bigger than we are. So, we're sharing our knowledge, resources and ideas to help more people and organisations take steps forward towards our vision of a green and thriving planet, where everyone can enjoy happy and healthy lives within the Earth's limits.

As part of this, we've launched our "5 Minute GAP" series, a collection of five minute conversations that will share how we work and what we're working on. We'll talk about what we're trying to achieve and why, how we function as an organisation, and the thinking behind our plans and strategy.

We'll be regularly sharing these conversations, which will feature different members of our team and trustee board, as well as external experts.

We hope you enjoy listening in to our chats, getting to know our team and finding out what makes us who we are. 

Audio only version:

If you prefer to read rather than watch, the transcription is here: 

Lucy: You and I both love a bit of quantitative data, but sometimes, you know, qualitative data and talking to people and case studies can be one of the most effective ways for us to really understand how a project through a campaign has really resonated. So what about... what do you think about the sort of  qualitative data collection? 

Tessa: Yeah, I mean, when there's space and time and budget to do it, it's, I think, yeah really, really important to do. And it gives that added level of detail. Right. Because there's only so much, no matter how amazing the Lucy’s are who create the questions, you know, there's only so much that a quantitative question can really get under the skin of things. And so, yeah, my, my favourite evaluations I've worked on have been a mixture of quant, qual. I mean, in the past, I've done stuff like neuro testing. There are so many different like tools and techniques that are out there that really try to get to the different levels, like what someone will say, what someone's actually thinking, but might subconsciously and might not, might not express what people might be thinking, but don't feel comfortable to say in a certain environment, like just thinking about human behaviour and all the different ways that might be needed to fully understand it. 
And it's also confusing, right? Because sometimes that data contradicts itself. And so you need experts like yourself to be able to take multiple different data sets and be able to synthesize in a way that that makes sense. 

Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're right that there are just so many different techniques that we can use to do evaluations. And I think that's one of the really important reasons behind kind of networking across the sector and across other sectors as well, so outside of perhaps the charity echo chamber. Beyond that and learning about different techniques that other organisations are using and we're always open, I think, at GAP to learning from other people and also sharing what we've learned and what's worked, but also what hasn't worked. 

Tessa: I think that's what's been really cool about coming from a different sector into GAP is that the way that we did things in government was... I learned a lot there, but also I've learned a lot coming over here in the last nine months or how long I've been here, because with different kind of resources and different kind of audiences, you have different tactics available to you. And yeah, you and I talked a lot about wanting to learn more what other people are doing. Always open for a coffee chat, to talk about evaluation. 

Lucy: Absolutely! And I think another thing that's really important about evaluations is, is how kind of motivating they can be to you as someone who works on a project and to your team and sort of understanding that, you know you've put all these hours into a project and you put your heart and soul into it. And perhaps it's been going on for two or three years, and that really the evaluation at the end of it can really be the icing on the cake of kind of showing you that this is having a real impact beyond our charity and, you know, in society and having planetary impacts. And perhaps shifting things in policy terms as well. So I think that the motivational benefit to evaluations is sometimes overlooked, but I think they're so important too. 

Tessa: Yeah. And even if it isn't showing as much impact as we want it to show, there's a road map to how we can progress that. And that should be a kind of exciting thing to come together as a team, to think about that longer term planning that might not be going as fast as we want, but there is a way to kind of push it. Push it more. 

Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. 

Tessa: Do you think, like because you've done a lot of behaviour change work, do you think it's like harder because something that I always found hard when working  in health behaviour change is that people always want to see like real world data. They want to see that kind of ultimate thing having changed. And well, when we think about the projects we do on realistically what we can shift, it's mostly like change behaviour or attitude. And and what I find really interesting is like how you can explain that to people who might not be as knowledgeable about that kind of process like yeah. Have you, from your experience would tap in like. 

Lucy: Yeah, I think it's about particularly working in sort of on projects that are trying to shift sort of advocacy or policy change or perhaps even changing legislation. That's always going to be difficult for an organisation to be able to... it's kind of, yeah, contribution versus attribution and how much we can say that we have influenced that particular shift in policy. You know, it's really difficult to disentangle the different influences that the media has had and organisational campaigns and also, you know, particular MPs with a particular interest or, you know, other organisations and there's such a complicated landscape involved that it can be quite difficult to tease apart the relative influence that different organisations have had, which can be frustrating. 

But it's also, you know,  understandable. It's such a complicated area. But I think coming into the campaigning world, as I have at GAP, that's one of the challenges I think that I'm still trying to figure out and learn about is how we can be better at measuring and demonstrating our contribution to sort of policy change. And yeah, I'd like to keep learning about how we can do that.