Supporting self-evaluation in charities
Our lead consultant, Sini Rinne-Kerridge, shares how we are supporting organisations to build practical, sustainable approaches to self-evaluation.
Why we’re rethinking evaluation
Evaluation often becomes a separate process. It’s a report written at the end of a project, with limited use in day-to-day work.
That can make it feel disconnected from delivery and harder to use when decisions need to be made. That’s why we’ve changed how we support it.
Instead of handing over finished findings, we work alongside teams to co-design frameworks, support data collection and help make sense of the results.
It’s a more collaborative, flexible approach that focuses on long-term learning.
Our recent work with Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity, brought this to life. We helped them evaluate Bereavement in the Workplace, a programme for small and medium-sized employers.
The evaluation helped Sands strengthen their approach, and they’ve already begun applying the findings to improve the programme.
How our approach has changed
We have delivered full external evaluations in the past: designing the framework, collecting data, analysing findings and producing reports.
While this can be useful, it doesn’t always lead to long-term use of the learning. And it rarely strengthens a charity’s internal ability to do more of this work themselves.
That’s why we’ve changed our approach. We now focus on:
- co-developing practical, proportionate evaluation frameworks
- helping teams define and track meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs)
- providing tools and coaching to make sense of data
- leading data collection where needed, with a clear plan for handover
- using accessible formats, such as short summaries or visual outputs, over lengthy reports.
We help charities build sustainable evaluation practice, not deliver one-off outputs.
What evaluation support looks like in practice
We worked with Sands to plan and deliver an evaluation that felt useful and manageable for their team.
Together, we co-developed a theory of change, shaped a practical framework and adapted existing data collection tools. We tested these tools with employers and parents to make sure they were inclusive and appropriate.
We supported the team to collect and analyse data, then paused for reflection before final reporting.
Sands published the final report in summer 2025 and are already using the insights to strengthen and scale the programme.