Archive for year: 2025

In this step you need to consider how you will go about collecting the data to help you understand if your programme or service is working towards the outcomes you identified in your Theory of Change.

Your data will fall into 2 types:

• Quantative
• Qualitative

Below are some of the methods most frequently used for collecting Outcome information:

• Observations
• Interviews
• Case studies
• Keeping records and notes
• Surveys

Each of these methods has its pros and cons, and before you choose, important questions you should ask yourself include:

• Do we already collect this information, or could we adapt the monitoring systems we already have in place?
• Do we need to collect information from all our users, or could we collect it from a smaller group. If we do this, will it mean that certain groups are not represented?
• What methods are suitable for our service and its beneficiaries?
• Consider what tools and data sources are already available before developing your own.
• Collaborate with others and share measurement tools where possible to save time and resources.

The next step is to think about the practicalities of collecting your data:

• When should this data be collected? e.g. before, during and after an intervention.
• Who will collect the data?

Further information and resources:

 A basic introduction to data collection methods can be found on the NPC’s website.

Choosing your evaluation methods – Fit for Purpose is a recorded webinar by Evaluation Support Scotland. It takes you through some of the factors to consider when choosing appropriate evaluation tools, the pros and cons of a “validated tool” versus home-grown and the importance of fitting your evaluation methods to the values of your organisation.

https://evaluationsupportscotland.org.uk/resources/fit-for-purpose-webinar/

Creative evaluation methods – less formal data collection methods could be more suitable for your organisation e.g. using drawings and videos, diaries and storytelling. Scottish Evaluation Service has a useful resource hub to give you ideas. It covers tools such as Choosing Pictures and Employability Skills Wheel. NPC also gives some advice around using Creative methods and you can download their method cards here.

Impactasaurus is a great free resource which offers a bank of questionnaires to choose from and  also supports you to report on the results, after using one of their questionnaires.

Communicating Impact

When thinking about sharing your outcomes you need to think about your audience – how might they want to see your impact communicated?

There are lots of ways you can communicate your impact:

Spoken word – this can be engaging and give the opportunity to hear the voice of your beneficiaries, which can be very powerful. Consider creating podcasts and videos. Podbean is a hosting service that offers a free basic service.

Written formats – you might want to think about an Impact Report . The organisation Ideas to Impact’s blog on how to write a Impact Report gives you an outline plus a list of examples to help inspire you. You could try a simpler format e.g.  Blog or a newsletter. Case-studies can also be very effective.

Visual Formats:

There are several options:

Poster – Posters can display key quotations or headline statistics, and can be produced quickly and with limited resources. People should ideally be able to read posters within 30 seconds, so keep them simple and brief.

Charts and diagrams – using a formatted Excel spreadsheet to record information and creating visual features such as pie and bar charts. There are many tutorials on the internet to help you do this.

Pictogram/Infographic – present the data you have collected using graphics or your organisations branding. The simplicity of this method makes it accessible to all organisations and community groups as a quick, shared way of showing what you do and the difference you make.

They can be used by larger organisations as a quick way to demonstrate value, though the complexity of larger organisations may need a distillation to identify the key impacts or messages.

Wordclouds – are a quick, accessible and stakeholder-friendly way of presenting top-level qualitative data. They allow you to identify the language and sentiments used to express your user’s experiences.  They are useful as they enable you to review insights without having the drill too deeply into the data.

Further information and resources:

In NPC’s short paper Data Visualisation: what’s it all about?, they look at what data visualisation is, how charities can get started using it, and provide handy tips and resources.

Icons: if all you need is images to break up the text, the Noun Project has a wide range of free icons to download and use.

Infographics Canva can help bring different types of data together into one graphic.

Words: Taqxedo, Wordclouds, and Word tree are all tools to analyse and show the frequent words in a body of text.

Examples of infographics:

DigitalCharityLab’s founder Jean O’Brien has collected together some of the best charity Infographics and they can be found here on Pinterest

No Limits is a charity based in Southampton providing information, advice, counselling and support through a range of services available ‘under one roof’. They produce an annual Impact Report which opens with an accessible and engaging infographic giving the headline facts about their service and it’s impact