Evaluation and research conference 2007
Big Lottery Fund's first national conference on evaluation, 'Tidy findings in an untidy world', was held on 1 November 2007 in London
Twenty-two speakers, about 100 participants from a wide range of organisations and a dozen members of BIG’s evaluation and research team attended the conference, which featured a lively blend of individual presentations, panel discussions, small group sessions, and an entertaining debate, “This House believes evaluation is more interesting than influential”. (Audio and PowerPoint downloads are available below).
The aim of the meeting, (in the words of Chief Executive Stephen Dunmore in a parallel publication This document summaries key findings from our evaluation and research over the past 12 years. It outlines our approach to evaluation and research and details our impact and le..., was to share the experience gained over 12 years of evaluation and research by BIG and its predecessors, and to discuss new approaches.
Evaluation, he said, plays a key role in achieving BIG’s mission of being an “intelligent funder ... rather than simply an efficient grant-maker".
Echoing Juliet Mountford, Deputy Director of Strategy at the Office of the Third Sector, who offered her 'top 10 tips' on getting evaluation findings into use, the mock-debaters concluded that communication is the key to shifting evaluation out of the realm of the "utterly interesting" and into a position where it has an impact on strategy and policy making.
Stephen spoke for many when he emphasised the importance of evaluation -- not just doing it, but learning from it: "Evaluation and research are wasted if we don’t learn from what we discover.” Dissemination is one aspect of learning, but it is also crucial to embed the new knowledge “so that it is part of our DNA”.
Click on the link below to download a brief report of the 2007 conference including the four parallel sessions.
Download slides and audio here:
| Conference session | Downloads |
|---|---|
| Intelligent evaluation Stephen Dunmore, Chief Executive, Big Lottery Fund |  Audio download Automatically imported binary.- 3,219KB (MP3, 3MB) |
| Evaluation at the Big Lottery Fund: themes and findings Sarah Mistry, Head of Evaluation and Research, Big Lottery Fund Describes the opportunities presented by the Big Lottery Fund's programme of evaluation and research, and talks about the purpose, implementation and usefulness of evaluation. |
(MP3, 6.5MB) |
| Evaluation, power and influence Juliet Mountford, Office of the Third Sector discusses how evaluation can be used to influence policy development, and the challenges of the political environment. |
(MP3, 4.5MB) |
| Capturing the benefits to individuals Steve Platt, University of Edinburgh and Sara Burns, Triangle Consulting The voices of individual service users can often be overlooked, as involving them in evaluations can be expensive, time consuming and difficult. This session presented innovative solutions for capturing the experience of beneficiaries. |
|
| 'This House believes that evaluation is more interesting than influential' Martin Brookes (NPC), Diana Leat, Leslie Morphy (Crisis), Joe Saxton (nfpSynergy), Chair: David Carrington A lively mock-debate on the usefulness of social policy evaluation and research, invoking anecdotes, examples, humour, logic, sarcasm and statistics. |
(MP3, 13MB) |
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