Getting to grips with Evaluation and Impact

How can you tell if what your organisation does is making a difference in your community? You may feel you’re changing things for the better, but how do you demonstrate this to someone else, so they clearly understand the importance of what you do?

Getting to Grips with Evaluation and Impact will help you put some simple things in place to identify, measure and explain to others the impact of your work. The session will include explanations of terms that funders might expect you to use, like outcomes, outputs or indicators.

This session will be useful to you if your organisation:

• works in a rural or island location
• is small, grass roots and community led
• applies for funding
• is unsure what the terms impact, outcome, or output means
• doesn’t include evaluation in the early stage of planning or delivering its work

Community groups working in rural and island areas play a key role in supporting a wide range of local needs and priorities. But sometimes they struggle to raise the funds they need, or to manage, plan, measure or share the impact of what they do.

Our Getting to Grips With... programme provides targeted help and support to small, community-led, grass roots organisations who have not applied for Scottish Government, LEADER or Lottery funding before, or who have been unsuccessful with any of the applications they have made.

These free, one-hour online sessions give an introduction to six areas that organisations have indicated that they worry about, or lack skills in. These include fundraising, evaluation, planning for the future, and ensuring your organisation has all the right documents and procedures in place.

With limited numbers and small groups, each session will provide targeted advice, cover basic principles, some top tips, and include opportunities to share experience with rural organisations doing similar work.