“Thanks for your support. Your recommendations all look great to me, make perfect sense and I have been able to reference them in my report”

Hayley Jane Simms, Langworthy Cornerstone

“The Leeds City Council Enterprise Support Team and Enterprising Leeds have found the Indicate self-evaluation process beneficial to all concerned”

Amrit Choda, Leeds City Council

“We really enjoyed the two days and thought it went really well too. We have had some feedback from residents and staff already who all thought the sessions were very effective and are keen to see the next steps. I look forward to receiving the write up”

Marc Fury, Newport City Homes

“It's increasingly important to be able to prove the value of what we do, and Indicate is a service which can help you do that”

Susan Aktemel, Founder of Impact Arts

Enterprising Leeds focuses on raising the profile of enterprise and increasing self-employment rates in the city. It aims to narrow the gap between the most disadvantaged people and communities in Leeds and the rest of the city. Building on learning from past initiatives in Leeds and elsewhere the team provides a mix of stimulation, coaching, hands-on start-up assistance and follow up support.

Faced with demands from funders like the City Council and ERDF the team was already tracking its activity. But the next challenge was to develop a clearer picture of progress towards outcomes and true impacts. Using the Indicate service to do this meant a half day workshop for the full team, follow up meetings, extensive phone and email support, customised tools and concise reporting.

Amrit Choda of the Enterprising Leeds team said:

"Indicate has proven to be a valuable vehicle for the LCC Enterprise Support to validate the ERDF implementation process. The LCC Enterprise Support Team and the Enterprising Leeds, have found the indicate self-evaluation process beneficial to all concerned. Being able to get continued support as and when required via the designated Indicate officer, has made the self evaluation process a productive way of learning.

"The Indicate officer was approachable and helped clarify problem points in a concise and informative manner.

"The self-evaluation process has helped untangle various tangents regarding the ERDF project, its delivery processes and the stakeholders concerned. It has also ensured we aim to discuss an exit plan for this particular scheme, with potential to use the evaluation findings as a learning tool when approaching new funding schemes.

"This method of self-evaluation can now be transferred to other externally funded projects and can be utilised to measure impact being made. The experiences acquired during this initial process can be fine tuned for the next externally funded projects being evaluated&rdquo".

Building Change Trust aims to build a strong, vibrant, independent and relevant community and voluntary sector in Northern Ireland that is open to new ideas and ways of working. They hope to build a sector that will:

• Be more effective and make best use of resources
• Advocate and drive positive change based on sound evidence
• Collaborate in pursuit of agreed aims
• Contribute to a shared, inclusive and outward looking Northern Ireland

The key output of our work was setting an agreed aim for the organisation and confirming the key short, medium and long term outcomes for the programme as a whole. The projects took part in workshops and then received their own clear outcomes and indicators to help them track their progress. They each established a clear action plan that together with the indicators will enable the BCT to report on the outcomes of its funding and be clear on the impact it will have.

The steering group are now more confident that they can be more proactive in work with partners. We found that the projects are clearer on what the programme, key stakeholders and they themselves expect to see as a result of their activities and services. They are more confident in what they are doing and on how they will report their successes; more able to see opportunities for collaborative work; and able to put in place a consistent system for tracking progress.

Active England was a major £100 million Sport England programme that aimed to increase the engagement of young people and others in sport. It funded 241 innovative projects across England to explore the relationship between physical activity and wellbeing. Sport England asked us to help change the culture of organisations and encourage them to self-evaluate.

We supported projects through a series of interactive guides, one-to-one support, training, and learning workshops. Our work concluded with an overall programme evaluation. We helped projects through self-evaluation put together logical frameworks to collect indicators that together measured progress towards outcomes. These findings and others are hosted on the Active England Learning Zone http://www.aelz.org These. findings and others have subsequently been adopted in a number of related projects, including the Well-Being Portfolio of The Big Lottery Fund.

Following publication of our final report, we were invited to present our findings to MPs sitting on the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport as part of the difference that The Big Lottery funds are making on the lives of excluded people.

The Premier League 4 Sport initiative involves 20 Premier League teams and the governing bodies of badminton, volleyball, judo and table tennis. It aims to engage 30,000 children and young people in the four Olympic sports. It is especially targeting hard-to-reach-groups including girls, older teenage boys and disabled young people. The Premier League brand initiates interest in the programme and piggybacks interest onto the wider range of sports.

We are supplying clubs and the Premier League club co-ordinators with self-evaluation tools and guidance to collect and report data on key performance indicators that help track progress towards outcomes. We have developed guides that allow for the clubs and the co-ordinators to build capacity and understanding of self-evaluation. An addition to our Indicate type support is our InForm tool. We have developed a website where data is collated and analysed and which provides regular news bulletins featuring examples of best practice. All Premier League Clubs are encouraged to select their own evaluation tools and supply regular quantitative data. But also, with our support, the clubs are now using Most Significant Change (MSC) as a way of adding richness and context to their evaluations. MSC is an effective method of identifying unexpected outcomes by clarifying the real change the programme is making, programmes to share knowledge and enjoy a rich understanding of what they are achieving.

Sport England is using the ongoing findings from Premier League 4 Sport activities to feed into the design of other projects.

The Big Lottery Fund in Wales announced an initiative that would support children's play, promote healthy eating and greater activity by children using a family approach. The Way of Life is one of two programmes to come from the initiative. WOL encorporates 14 pilot projects which have been supported to develop approaches across three themes.

We conducted initial research to identify models that projects should use. This involved convening experts in the field to explore existing evidence and approaches. We helped applicants put their bids and business plans together to put forward to funders. We provide support to projects to enable them to establish the true outcomes of their interventions. We have developed a range of tools to promote self evaluation among projects and to strengthen local partnership working. At a programme level, we are comparing the impact of different approaches and themes to identify what works well and what does not work so well. Our contract has now been extended to include an overall programme evaluation.

We developed a website www.bigwayoflife.com and a suite of web based tools, supported by a programme of regular visits and project workshops.

Our research has identified the need for holistic approaches to the issue of Healthy Eating, as projects with direct links to mainstream services in education and health have fared well. Partnerships have been strengthened as a direct result of our Partnership Assessment Tool, which has enabled projects to identify internal strengths and weaknesses and to track changes in these over time.

Again as an addition to our Indicate package we offered The Evelyn Oldfield Unit a practical online tool to support Refugee and Migrant Community Organisations (RMCOs) to:

• Build on existing monitoring and evaluation
• capture baseline statistics
• capture longer term outcomes
• identify impact on wider community

This was a developed version of our InProgress tool. This tool was required as a way of RMCOs proving to funders and policy makers the value of their services. It will help the Evelyn Oldfield Unit to look at their support needs and help in developing training, guidance and other resources to meet their needs. There are five sections to this tool each of which relates to a leading practice them. Each section has a 'worksheet' for entering information. Each themed section has five categories linked to that theme. For each category a project will select the statement from a drop-down box that best matches your current situation.

This tool will help projects to highlight progress in delivering community impact and outcomes. It will help to identify areas that may need prioritised and suggest actions that will help a project to make progress. It will also allow projects to measure their own progress over time.

In addition to these projects we are supporting a number of other organisations with Indicate. Indicate for programmes or one of our extra services from our InAddition package of tools and resources. These include:

• Powys Council
• Swindon Borough Council
• East Ayrshire Council
• Impact Arts
• Scottish Mentoring Network
• Conwy Council
• Enterprising Leeds

The objectives for this project were to develop a set of shared metrics and service delivery outputs that can be used collectively to measure quantitative impact across three YMCAs in London and a wide range of programme areas. We were also asked to develop a set of shared wellbeing outcome indicators that enable 3 YMCAs to measure the qualitative impact of their work with beneficiaries and their communities. We developed a monitoring and evaluation toolkit that will act as a resource to support the organisation and their staff to understand and implement the outcomes methodology. The toolkit will be a simple and flexible resource that provides information relating to the monitoring system, its method and includes resources to support data collection and cost/benefit analysis of both soft and hard outcomes.

At the YMCA workshop participants identified the consequences of not having effective monitoring. These focused on:

• Getting left behind
• Declining reputation
• Less satisfaction among users
• Service delivery weakening
• Funding being scaled back

Having robust information to report on is essential. To report on impact of the services we developed a reporting tool that reflected the need to balance robustness with the practical limits of time and resources. It is better to gather good information about a small number of things than to try to gather lots and do it poorly. The principle of the reporting tool is that everything that goes into it is used in the report - so it is completely transparent. It can provide information for an individual project or location, or across an entire YMCA.