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Evaluation Toolkit

Evaluation Toolkit

The evaluation toolkit is a resource that you can use to help you plan and carry out the evaluation of your outreach activity.

What is the impact of your event/activity?

The toolkit is a set of resources to support the informal evaluation of outreach activities at the University of Warwick. It has been designed to support anyone who is delivering outreach sessions, events or activities on campus, in schools or in the community with young people understand the impact of their work.

What would you like to get out of your evaluation?

  • Justify the value of outreach activities to funders, your department or the Office for Student (specifically for Widening Participation)
  • gather information for long-term planning
  • support the formulation of new activities, programmes and events.
  • assess the effectiveness of current activities, programmes and events.
  • construct theories to better understand how to support attitudinal changes in our audience

Evaluation is

  • Not a test
  • Can be very informative and useful
  • About capturing your audience’s perspective
  • A means to understand what specific actions/decisions you took which had an impact on your audiences
  • A tool for development

What are the aims of your activity?

What would you like your audience:

  • to know
  • to feel
  • to understand
  • to do

as a result of your activity.

How to use the resources

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Click on the link provided to download the resource.

Outreach Theory of Change

Is your activity aimed at changing aspirations and expectations of your audience? or to shift attitudes and the identity of young people or their parents?

The problem your activity is trying to address are listed inside the pyramid with the first one that need addressing at the bottom. Before you can increase someone's knowledge about your subject, you first need to address any misconceptions or barriers they may have to consider your subject accessible to them.

Examples of what content your activity might have are listed on the right hand side.

Outreach Theory of Change

What aims is your activity addressing?

Using the Theory of Change you can then use a traffic light system to find out what aims your activity is covering. Not all aims will be covered and that's normal. If you are running multiple activities, you can use this system to ensure that overall you are covering all the aspects of the outreach theory of change.

Activity Evaluation and outreach overall offer evaluation

Pre and post surveys

Using the same survey questions before and after your event allows you to measure change

e.g.: changes in confidence, knowledge, attitude…

Note: you would need to ask the same questions at the start and at the end of your activity to get valid results.

Other Survey Questions:

“Was there anything about the activity that made you rate it the way you did?”

“Was there anything that specifically contributed to the outcomes?”

Example of Pre-activity survey on QualtricsLink opens in a new window

Example of Post-activity survey on QualtricsLink opens in a new window

Embedded activities

Evaluation activities that are embedded within your main event means that you are getting more honest and authentic responses as your audience may not realise that they are separate from the core activities. This kind of activities is useful especially with young children of primary school age. Here are some examples of activities:

A feedback wall

Another useful tool is to co-create a wall showing your audience learning before and after the event. A range of activities can be used here:

Staff observations

Staff at the event can be a very useful resource in terms of evaluation. You can ask them to choose a child to focus on and observe them at the start, during and at the end of your event and note anything they feel is relevant to the aims of your activity.

Staff observation form

Focus group/interviews

Interviews allow a deeper understanding of what is in your audience mind.

Note: standardised questions mean that you will be able to compare answers from different respondents.

Interview Questions:

“Was there anything about the activity that stood out to you?”
“What was the effect of that?”
“Why do you think that’s important?”

Audience Demographics

Your audience demographics can tell you a lot in terms of intersectional evaluation.

Head count

Knowing how many people came through your exhibtion space or took part in your activity is useful to know. It won't tell you what impact you had but it is always a good number to have for reporting and know what your scope is.

What activities were the most popular?

You can use a sticker system or coins in a smiley box to help your audience tell you which part of your activity was the most popular.

Important considerations

If you wish to use your evaluation as part of a research paper or for external evaluation you will need to have Ethics Approval iLink opens in a new windown place.

If you gather any protected information (date of birth, gender, name...) you will need a GDPR and privacy consent form in place. An example of consent form we use can be found here.

Anonymising the data before sharing it is best practice.

How will you share your findings?

Below are a few ideas and examples of how you could share your findings.

Poster

Posters are a great way to present your data visually and concisely. A poster can be used to summarise the impact of your project when presenting it to your colleagues, it can easily be shared on social media and by email and can be used for presentations at conferences.

Written report

A written report is used when you want to keep a standardised record of your activities over time. For example, you might be asked to produce a quarterly or annual report that can then be shared with senior colleagues or funders.

Case studies/Testimonies

Case studies and testimonies are a great way to present qualitative data and to show how your audience felt. They can be used as part of a poster or written report, as a blog post, on social media or in marketing material.