How evaluators can support community-led evaluation
Learning from the measuring change programme, this paper explores different methods of community-level evaluation and outlines the approaches evaluators and researchers can take.
This paper explores different approaches to community-level evaluation and looks at how to ensure they are useful and engaging for communities.
It can be difficult for community groups to find the time and resources to properly evaluate the work they do in their local areas. However, proper evaluation is crucial to measure how well projects achieve their goals and assess what worked well, what didn’t and what should be improved.
Understanding constraints to effective evaluation in communities is essential for evaluators and researchers.
Acknowledging these challenges, Local Trust offered support to Big Local areas to better measure the changes they have been making in their communities since 2019. The ‘measuring change’ support offer aims to develop these skills by matching Big Local partnerships with specialist providers to work at a timeframe that suits them. This helps to overcome the resource and time challenges communities face when it comes to evaluating their work as Local Trust also covers the costs.
Understanding constraints to effective evaluation in communities is essential for evaluators and researchers. This briefing and the full evaluation draw on findings from the pilot of the ‘measuring change’ support and outlines the approaches evaluators and researchers can take to support community-led evaluation.
