Evaluating Your Project
Nominet Trust’s mission is to find, develop and support initiatives that use digital technology to disrupt existing social challenges. This is more than using technology for social good as it sets out to rethink approaches to addressing social challenges in light of the affordances of digital technology. To ensure we can do that, we need to learn from all of the activities in which we’re engaged. Whether this is learning from our own research and that of others; understanding which funding models best suit our ambition or exploring new ways of articulating and addressing social challenges. At the heart of this is the need to learn from the projects in which we invest in a robust way that can inform our organisational approach. This is built on a belief that evaluation and reflection should be part of an ongoing learning process that goes from the projects that our partners deliver with diverse communities, through to our overall mission and investment approach.
Evaluation can seem a bit overwhelming sometimes. So here's a short guide to how we see evaluation, and tips on how to evaluate your project.
There are a number of key issues that arise when talking about evaluation, we've outlined some of them in more detail below. Please read them to understand our approach and, if appropriate, to inform your application to us. For further information, please contact us at developmentresearch@nominettrust.org.uk
Funding – if evaluation’s so important, do you fund it?
Frameworks – What does evaluation look like?
Funder + I’m not a researcher, how do I do it?
Cyclical evaluation – moving beyond the project report
Funding – if evaluation’s so important, do you fund it?
We recognise that learning and evaluation costs time and money, and if we want to maximise the learning then these costs should be made visible. For this reason we ask projects to allocate at least 5% of their total project budget for self evaluation. This means that resource for evaluation is ring fenced and, crucially, always proportional to the overall size of a project. This evaluation funding is to support your own reflection and project development, in the same way that we expect you to budget for project management and monitoring activities.
In addition to this internal evaluation, there are two further ‘costs’ which come from evaluation. The first is in reporting externally, the second is where the potential to learn from a project is beyond the 5% budget allocation. If there is extra work to be done to link your evaluation approach to the way in which you report to us (so that the evaluations across our portfolio are comparable) we can provide further funds to support this. If the model that you are testing provides particular opportunities for us to learn about how the internet can be used to disrupt social challenges we can allocate an extra 5% of the project’s budget to explore specific research questions (this is where the funding for evaluation is proportionate to the learning potential, rather than the size of the project). This funding may be spent on external evaluation, or if the partner has the interest and capacity, be added to extra internal evaluation.
Frameworks – what does evaluation look like?
Evaluation works best when it sits within a coherent framework. This offers clarity and can help structure the evaluation process and for this reason we use logic models to provide a basic overview of a project, and theory of change approaches for larger or more complex projects. However, analytical frameworks are generally not very intuitive and do not map onto the way in which a potential partner would tell the story of their project. For this reason we are developing approaches that remain intuitive to our partners, but offer robust systems to evaluate. One example of this is that our application form has been designed to follow the narrative that an applicant would normally follow when describing a project, but the questions map directly onto a logic model. When an applicant has completed their evaluation form they will be able to see the logic model of the project they have presented to us. This introduces the framework at the very beginning of our working ttogether
Funder + I’m not a researcher, how do I do it?
Evaluation is not always easy. Countless reports and discussion articles have highlighted that there is a lack of capacity in many organisations for rigorous evaluation. We are strongly committed to developing the capacity of organisations to generate effective and robust evaluations. Evaluation is an integral part of project delivery, not just for an investor’s or funder’s sake, but for the ongoing effectiveness of an organisation. For this reason, as part of our Funder + model, we offer ongoing support to organisations to develop their evaluation approach. At the start of the project we offer support from our Development Research team to support you in developing an evaluation plan. In some cases we are able to offer additional ongoing support throughout the life of the project. Where the evaluation is complex or a larger project, we offer the support of external evaluation professionals who can work closely with our partner organisations to both develop an effective evaluation approach, and to increase internal capacity for evaluation after the life of the project. The type of evaluation our funded partners engage with generally results from a collaborative discussion between our project partners and the Development Research team. Some partner projects come with a particular aim, while others develop their approach as part of their engagement with us.
Cyclical evaluation – moving beyond the project report
For Nominet Trust, evaluation is also an important iterative, internal learning activity. This is separate, but linked to project reporting and our overall requirement to report to our corporate founders, Nominet. Every project and partner we work with offers vital lessons into what works in the area of using the internet for social good. This learning feeds into our organisational development. We have a wider research informed cycle that takes the knowledge from our research activities (such as the State of the Art Reviews) through to targeted funding calls. The projects and partners we invest in from these funding calls then offer lessons about what models, processes and practices work to achieve real social change. We can then take these lessons and feed them into our next cycle of development. We know the partners we work with have the skills and capacity to deliver the work they do. What is important is that we have ongoing honest and robust learning about what works about the models and projects they are trying. The learning from this contributes towards a wider, open body of knowledge that we will share through our knowledge centre.
