At Counting What Counts, we want to encourage our users to reflect upon the results of their evaluation activities and to support them in using their Impact & Insight Toolkit (Toolkit) data in a meaningful way beyond mandatory reporting.

The automatically generated Insights Reports provide an analysis of the data from an individual evaluation, and the Summary Reports allow the dimensions results for 4 evaluations containing ‘core’ dimensions to be compared.  Yet, we believe there is potential to find deeper insights by looking at all of an organisation’s evaluations together and contextualising the evaluation results by comparing to those from other similar organisations.  However, doing this sort of analysis and interpretation takes time and effort from a skilled data analyst.

To demonstrate the benefits of engaging with data in this way, we decided to work with a couple of our users to do a more in-depth analysis to help them better understand their data and to work together on a case study to demonstrate to other users of the Toolkit the value in consistent evaluation and thoughtful analysis.

For these case studies we selected two very different organisations to work with: Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch.  Both these organisations had been consistently using the Toolkit to collect data across their programme over several years and had a substantial amount of data to work with.

We have learnt a lot from the process of putting these case studies together, and, as well as publishing these case studies, we will be sharing what we have learned with our users in the form of new and improved tools and support materials – so watch this space!

We hope that those reading the case studies will find them useful and inspiring.  Please get in touch if you are trying to do some more in-depth analysis as described and are interested in putting together a case study with some support.

You can take a look at the case studies here:

Yorkshire Sculpture Park – available now!

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch – available now!

Image credit: Photo by fabio on Unsplash