Skip to main content

Learning organisations

Embedding a meaningful approach to evaluation and continuous improvement depends on having a supportive, enabling environment for learning across your organisation. Before you begin working through any of the questions, there are three key factors to consider:

1. Leadership

Leaders (and not just CEOs!) need to demonstrate a commitment to reflective evaluation that sits at the heart of the organisation and its operations and is not just driven by external requirements from funders or other stakeholders.

It is an essential leadership trait in the youth sector to reflect on and value the different aspects of evaluation and incorporate them in day-to-day decision making. An area that is particularly important and often missing in the youth sector is the focus on evidence and impact at the design stage – when you are thinking about and planning new provisions, for example, as part of a funding application.

Leaders in the sector need to ensure that all programmes and services are rooted in evidence, and decisions about how the provision will be structured and offered are taken thoughtfully. Remember that evidence is not just other people’s research – it can also be practice-based evidence (what you’ve learned from your previous work, and your professional experience).

This commitment to evaluation needs to be shown not just by leaders but shared across the team of staff and volunteers.

2. Values

Organisational values help teams make decisions and shape how things are done, and the activities detailed on an annual or strategic plan. There must be an agreement on values across the team, and it helps when an organisation’s approach and commitment to learning and evaluation is part of this value set.

If there is an organisational commitment to evaluation, you are more likely to find:

  • Embedded evaluation that ‘goes with the grain’ of delivery, rather than feeling like a distraction or a burden.
  • Evaluation as part of continuous improvement and learning, rather than a demand from outside the organisation that needs to be complied with.
  • A lower-stakes accountability culture, which doesn’t blame or punish but instead offers support for improvement.

Overall, incorporating evaluation into your organisation’s values means that you are constantly learning to support better outcomes for young people, not just jumping through hoops because a funder or someone else has told you to do so.

3. Systems

Systems need to be in place to help you collect, manage and analyse good data on every question in this framework. ‘Data’ just means ‘things we know’ that we intentionally gather for reference or analysis. ‘Data’ doesn’t always mean numbers and figures, and no one type of data is inherently better or worse than another. It just depends on what you’re collecting it for. Data collection does not have to be daunting. The first step of data collection involves deciding what you want to gather, why, and what you will do with it. 

We define useful data as:

  • Actionable: it produces information on which you can regularly act.
  • Feasible to collect: it is straightforward to collect and fits comfortably into your everyday work without disrupting it.
  • Productive: it generates information that you find useful within your work andisn’t handed on to someone else without it informing your work first.
  • Comparative: it helps you compare what you do over time, or what others do, establishing good benchmarks for high-quality work with young people.
     

When it comes to systems for data collection, less is more for the majority of organisations supporting young people. Unless you have a healthy budget and good support, it will be much better to focus on a small number of key areas that are fully integrated into your delivery, and you can monitor systematically. Most importantly, data should give you valuable information concerning the question you’retrying to answer. No data will be able to answer all the questions you have about your work, and that’s okay. Narrow your focus of inquiry to what is most important and choose the data that will support you in answering that.

magnifying glass

Case study

An organisation received two years of funding to deliver a youth social action project. They could not secure additional funding to continue the specific project however, they were able to learn a lot about the benefits of connecting the young people who were involved with me;mbers of their local communities. At the end of the project, they ran two sessions with the young people who had been involved in developing some best practice tips on community engagement and wrote this up as an internal guide. This guide helped to inform conversations that explored whether they could introduce a new community engagement strand to one of their core programmes – building on the learning from their social action project.