Thanks to all our 2022 clients!

Images of all our client logos - there are a lot including national trust, wildlife trusts, in-situ, county councils and more

Huge thanks to all our 2022 clients, many of whom we will still be working with in 2023 and beyond.
The office is closing for Christmas on Thursday 22nd December and will reopen refreshed and renewed on Tuesday 3rd January.

Happy holidays to all.

Kirsty and all at The Evaluator

Inclusion at The Evaluator: Figuring it out for everyone

Accessibility is something that is really important to our organisation. We want to figure things out for people and projects, and part of that is figuring out how to do that for the widest range of people possible!

We are a disability led organisation which is one reason we are passionate about being inclusive. We try hard to follow the social model of disability where we understand that we need to adapt the world around a person’s disabilities and access needs rather than expect them to adapt. We recognise that disability is more than wheelchair access, it’s a wide range of adaptations, many of which are easy and free. We try and include as wide a range of access needs as we can think of in each project and are always willing to adapt to make sure our processes and materials suit the client and participant needs.

We are still learning and imagine we will be for all time, we know we don’t have all the answers but here are some of the ways we try to be more inclusive, all of which are actions we have carried out.

  • When we run 1:1 interviews we can offer to send questions in advance, plan in comfort breaks and run these at times that suit people – including evenings and weekends
  • We can use large font sizes on emails or text clients or schedule regular zoom calls
  • We use easy to read fonts on our surveys and our infographics and use contrasting colours in graphs as much as possible
  • We are happy to communicate however people prefer – whether that is by email, by text, by zoom, by phone call – or even mixed methods, for example mixing text and video call by using zoom captioning
  • We can run sessions when people have supporters or interpreters available and make our timetable flexible
  • We provide large print versions of our final reports and executive summaries on request
  • We have worked hard to ensure all our visuals are compatible with screen readers, use alt-text as much as possible and break reports into sections using headings and subheadings for clarity
  • We can provide surveys in alternative ways – for example using Google Forms or as paper copies
  • We worked with a client to use sign language videos on our surveys to make sure people understand the questions asked and adapted our questions to suit British Sign Language (BSL) rather than expecting BSL to adapt to our questions
  • We offer adaptations to our interview processes when hiring and offer flexible working conditions and hours

We have three current and recent clients who have taught us a lot about being more accessible.

  1. Attitude is everything

Attitude is everything have been passionate about including people with disabilities for a long time now. They have a few cultural approaches which we love and which we have tried to follow. Their overarching tag line is ‘nothing for us, without us’ and therefore we have learned to test materials and not make assumptions without asking. It helps us keep flexible. The other way AisE work is to help people make changes from where they are now, not to criticise what they have or haven’t done. Again, that’s something we use now with all our clients, and try to embody ourselves – helping them to make positive progress from wherever they currently are, using data driven decisions of course.

We particularly love their ‘how we think about disability’ approach, which you can read here. 

  1. Deaf Rave

Troi Lee from Deaf Rave was a great client to work with, and we adapted our communication styles, using zoom on mornings when a sign-language interpreter was available. We learned about the Deaf Culture, and attended an event in person to communicate with sign language interpreters therefore adapting our style. Troi described working with Kirsty Rose Parker from The Evaluator as “if you need a evaluator report done.  She the one!  I have not seen any better report than anyone else has done.”

Troi is a passionate advocate for Deaf music and regularly works with the BBC, most recently taking part in the BBC music introducing festival to put on London x Deaf Rave. You can see more about that festival here.

  1. VocalEyes

VocalEyes are a charity who work with people with many different disabilities including visual impairments and people who use screen readers. This has meant making a number of changes to our project evaluation including software changes, allowing for access needs such as emailing questions and using zoom captioning. This has allowed us to learn more about inclusion and practical methods to adapt our styles.

To provide an evaluation report which can be understood by the widest possible range of people, we are currently learning how to make the best accessible report we can and are working on developing spoken video versions of our executive summaries in final reports. Please do ask us if you would want a version of this!

VocalEyes have just produced ten ways to attract deaf, disabled and neurodivergent visitors to heritage sites which is well worth a read. Click here to look at those ten tips.

 

New Client; Back On Our Map (BOOM)

Back On Our Map is a pioneering project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and hosted by the University of Cumbria. The project works with communities to reintroduce a suite of locally threatened or extinct species to South Cumbria.

Back on Our Map (BOOM) aims to re-engage communities in South Cumbria with their natural environment, by restoring the landscape and reintroducing and reinforcing locally threatened or extinct native species. National Lottery players support the £2m project, alongside a number of other public, private and charitable sector organisations. Led by the University of Cumbria, BOOM is working closely in partnership with Morecambe Bay Partnership, and lead partners including the Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Natural England and Forestry England. The project:

  • Will help to build healthy, resilient, empowered communities by providing an exciting range of reintroduction-based social activities and training events.
  • Covers an area of 600km2, extending along the lowlands of Morecambe Bay from Barrow-in-Furness in the west to Arnside and Silverdale in the east and Grizedale Forest in the north.
    Restores habitat and reintroduces species across a network of protected areas including Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), National Nature Reserves (NNRs) and Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
  • Is a multi-species, landscape-scale project, maximising the opportunities for community engagement, restoring and connecting whole ecosystems to reverse the decline in biodiversity.

 

The Evaluator is delighted to be working with the BOOM project team to both measure and collate the impact on people, to carry out 1:1 interviews and surveys, attend events and design quizzes. We’ll be supporting training the team, having regular conversations and reflections, interviewing partners and reading notes collected throughout the project lifetime.

The information collected will be brought together for a final evaluation report in June 2023. You can find out more about the project here, including events and frequently asked questions. 

 

 

New project: An evaluation framework for Climate FORTH

Climate FORTH is aiming to Further Our Resilience Through Heritage. Run by a partnership of: RSPB Scotland (lead agency), Clackmannanshire Council, Green Action Trust,  Falkirk Council, Fife Council, NatureScot, Stirling Council, Sustrans and including advisory partner Historic Environment Scotland. The Evaluator is delighted to be working with the partnership to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework including developing some dedicated tools to measure climate resilience in organisations and individuals.

As Climate FORTH is a project aiming to tackle climate resilience, we started thinking about how this is the ability to bounce back or to weather the storm. This led us onto the idea of creating self-scoring checklists which equate your own or your organisations resilience with the Beaufort Scale. Can you weather a gale? Or just a light breeze? This is what we are working on at present.

The official project description is below;

The Inner Forth Futures partnership is engaged in an ambitious and innovative programme to study, scope and co-design activities with local communities around the unique resilience needs of this landscape. The wealth of existing social, natural and built heritage in this area provides both challenges for adaptation and vital opportunities to facilitate economic and climate readiness.
Across the Inner Forth, from Stirling City to Forth Bridges, heritage and communities, have historically been, entwined in narratives of change and adaptation – whether that be economic, environmental, or societal.

Today, changing climate,  flood susceptibility, built development, economic change, recreation and Covid-19 are putting new pressures on people and place.
The Climate FORTH project covers areas of Clackmannanshire, Falkirk, Stirling and Fife that comprise the Inner Forth.

Climate FORTH aims to:
• Promote the value of local heritage, and use it to inspire positive action towards societal and climate change, particularly towards Scotland’s net zero climate targets.
• Increase the resilience of the Inner Forth’s natural and built heritage assets to societal and climate change.
• Increase resilience to change for people and places within the Inner Forth through heritage supporting the economy, healthy lifestyles, sustainable choices, and a just transition.

Climate FORTH is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and is currently in it’s development phase. You can read more about the project by clicking the link here. 

New Evaluation: Green Loop

The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, Fylde Borough Council on their arts and environment project; Green Loop. Based around Lytham St Anne’s, Green Loop as a name was inspired by the idea of creatively re-using the waste products which wash up on the shore.

There are three parts to this project including a new Eco-Market taking place at Fairhaven Lake, running with eco-friendly makers and crafts people and curated by Hopeful & Glorious. It has been really nice to work with Heather from Hopeful & Glorious as we worked together many years ago when both of us were working in Arts Development in Lancashire. Hopeful & Glorious curate many high quality events, and you can see more about them on their website here. 

Environmental artist Nerissa Cargill Thompson, is both creating an artist commission and working with a group of volunteers to take part in a 12 week programme to learn how to become an environmental maker with a creative business. That’s a journey of discovery for sure! We will enjoy writing about that as creative business is one of our particular interests.

Nerissa describes her work as:

Exploring change over time, not just eroding or decaying but new layers of growth, giving juxtapositions of structure and colour. Recent mixed media sculptures combine embellished textiles and cement cast in plastic packaging to highlight the legacy of disposables. Naturally inspired textures emphasise the way our waste becomes subsumed into the natural world around us.

Images of recent works can be seen on her website here. 

This project is run by Fylde Borough Council whose website is here, and the project is funded by Arts Council England.

Site Visit: Wilder Walkmill

The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, West Cumbria Rivers Trust to develop and write an evaluation framework for the nature site, and former colliery, Walkmill in Cumbria.

The site is currently used a lot by dog walkers and nature lovers, and has some quite unusual wildlife include rare dragonflies and adders. It is the site of a former colliery and we are excited to figure out how to link the industrial heritage into our evaluation plans. You can see more about West Cumbria Rivers Trust at their website here. 

We started this project with a site visit to chat to the main project team, and meet the consultants working on heritage interpretation, Minerva Heritage. We quickly found out we both are very keen on working WITH people, rather than FOR people and are looking forward to getting to know more about interpretation. You can see more about Minerva Heritage at their website here. 

It just happened to be a gloriously sunny day, what a wonderful way to start a project!

Image of site, Walkmill in Cumbria.

New Client: VocalEyes

The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, VocalEyes. We are going to be working with VocalEyes to evaluate their Heritage Access 2022 project.

An ambitious project working with 50 volunteers, Heritage Access 2022, will support and train volunteer access researchers in a large-scale digital volunteering project that will benefit over 3,000 heritage sites in the UK and their visitors.

VocalEyes (great name!) helps bring arts and culture to life for blind and visually impaired people. They support arts and heritage venues through audio description services, training, consultancy and advice. You can see more about VocalEyes on their website here. 

We’re hiring!

Evaluator Needed

Salary £24-27,000 FT

  • Part time applicants considered
  • Hybrid working model, mainly home working with at least one day a week in the office in Barnoldswick, Lancashire
  • Some travel is required, access to a car and full driving licence is essential

The Evaluator is a fast-growing evaluation consultancy founded in 2017 by Kirsty Rose Parker. Helping charities and not for profit organisations to demonstrate the impact of their work creatively and visually. The Evaluator uses the tagline “We’ll figure it out for you”.

 

We are often ‘measuring the unmeasurable’ and fixing problems on a day-to-day basis. The tasks included in this work range from data capture, face to face consultations, telephone calls, research, analysis, report writing, visual data creation, presenting information and creative problem solving. We work at a range of levels including strategically and operationally.

 

 

As the business is growing fast, we need another two evaluators, and are willing to consider full and part time applicants. We are particularly keen to recruit a ‘people-person’ who loves chatting to people and helping people to tell their stories.  We are prepared to train the right applicants; you do not need to have worked as an evaluator previously. We think personality and skills matter more than experience in this role.

 

We want someone who:

  • Is comfortable talking to a wide range of people and skilled at helping people feel comfortable and getting the best from conversations
  • A great listener who can nurture people and groups to express themselves
  • Is a brilliant report writer
  • Has an eye for detail, as attention to detail matters in this role
  • Can interpret data and read spreadsheets, tables and graphs
  • Is passionate about solving problems and making the world better
  • Is honest, reliable, punctual, willing to learn and enthusiastic.

Desirables include:

  • A maths or economics qualification
  • Customer service experience
  • Evaluation experience
  • Social return on investment experience
  • Business development or sales experience
  • Project Management experience
  • Some experience of the charity/ not for profit/ public sector

In return; The Evaluator can offer an exciting and dynamic work opportunity where every day is different, and we are often making a difference to people’s lives. This is work that means something. Current projects include conservation, heritage building work, opportunities for Deaf and disabled people in the music industry, exploring how wellbeing and nature interact, measuring the impact of long-term arts projects, national festivals and working with long term unemployed and some offenders.

 

We are looking for someone who is happy to work from home for the time being, able to travel to East Lancashire once a week for one office day, happy to travel around as part of the work undertaken.  Our clients are all over the UK, although travel is not a regular occurrence. Very occasional evening working and weekend working may be required with notice.

 

We are currently offering these roles as full time, but are happy to consider part time roles for the right people.

 

How to apply

 

To apply; please send a two-page summary addressing the skills we are after and a succinct CV to kirsty@theevaluator.co.uk by 5pm on Wednesday 18th May 2022. We may close this opportunity sooner if sufficient applications are received.  We will invite those shortlisted to an interview and this will include a task to complete.

 

We welcome applications from disabled individuals and can make reasonable adjustments to the interview process if required, please ask. We also welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds, although applicants must be located in the UK and have a right to work in the UK.

New Client; Surrey County Council

The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new client, Surrey County Council. We’re working on an innovative placemaking project being delivered between a partnership lead jointly by Reigate & Banstead Borough Council and Surrey County Council to put the community at the heart of placemaking.

We are following and measuring the process and creating a capacity building report, a toolkit for others wanting to do placemaking in their locality and an animated case study to put the story of this work back into the mouths of the people taking part.