Evaluation Workshop Series for Wesley Mission Queensland
Status: Completed 2023
Client: Wesley Mission Queensland
Background
Wesley Mission Queensland is a not-for-profit organisation that provides a wide range of community services in Queensland. The services include in-home care, respite care, retirement living, NDIS support, and crisis intervention, for over 100,000 people each year through their various programs and initiatives.
Wesley Mission Queensland approached Beacon Strategies to enhance their staff's evaluation capabilities. This involved upskilling their staff in program design evaluation and providing them with a comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end process of program design and evaluation.
Approach
Using our step-by-step approach, we created a training session around each of the below, which generally follows our method of evaluation:
1. Getting Ready
Understanding the drivers and context helps us to determine the objectives and scope of our evaluation, and then start working on developing a documented evaluation approach.
2. Define the program
Defining how a program is designed is an important first step in any evaluation, as it will enable us to explore whether a program achieved its objectives, and if not, why not.
While there are many program design products, one way to do this is through the development of a program logic.
3. Identify Stakeholders
In a collaborative evaluation, we need to identify who is a stakeholder, consider what they value or need through the process, and identify how and when they should be involved.
4. Create evaluation questions
Having well-formed evaluation questions is critical as they inform the type of data we collect.
Evaluation questions across different domains help us to consider the program from different perspectives, such as its appropriateness, effectiveness and efficiency.
4.1 Collect the right data
A planned and structured approach to data collection helps us to map out what we need to know to answer our questions and the mix of methods we’ll use to source high-quality data and insights.
5. Analyse and report findings
Analysing our findings (qual and quant) helps us to describe what happened (and how), why that’s important, and what should happen next.
Sharing our findings and learnings through targeted reporting strategies for key audiences helps to ensure our evaluation leads to change.
6. Making it stick
Making evaluation ‘stick’ within our organisations requires developing the right capabilities and conditions to enable good evaluation practice to happen as a routine way of working.
Vision alignment
This project aligned with Beacon's vision for a more impactful social purpose sector by building the capacity of the WMQ team to do more evaluation and design-style work.
Building capability in this space means that the Wesley Mission team is more likely to evaluate and refine their work, creating a greater impact for the communities they serve.
Project outcomes
Beacon hosted six interactive sessions delivered over three months to upskill the WMQ team.
The sessions were designed to be informative but not exhaustive, to enable the people at WMQ a foundation to complete their own evaluations with a more solid understanding of what to be asking and how to improve, as well as more confidence in completing their own evaluations.
Are you looking for evaluation training for your organisation? Get in touch with the team for an obligation-free chat!
