Impact and evaluation · Six days minimum · From £3,000

You are reporting a great deal and learning very little from it.

An honest look at how you measure and report what you actually achieve, where the evidence is thinner than you think, where it is stronger than you think, and what to fix first.

When this is the right piece of work

Four situations this is built for

Reporting has become a chore that tells nobody anything

You produce it, the board receives it, and no decision has ever changed because of it. The problem is rarely effort. It is usually that what gets counted was settled years ago by people answering a different question.

A funder has asked for something you cannot currently evidence

Either the data was never collected, or it was collected in a form nobody can use. Both are fixable, and knowing which one you have is the first useful thing.

You suspect your evidence is better than your reporting makes it look

This is more common than the reverse. Most organisations are sitting on monitoring data, case records and staff knowledge that would carry a case, and have never had the time to put it in one place.

You are about to commission new research and are not sure you need to

Sometimes you do. Often what is needed is a different question asked of what you already hold. It is worth spending six days finding out before spending considerably more not finding out.

What you get

Four things, all of them yours to keep

  • A diagnostic of your existing tools, outcomes and reporting, written plainly rather than scored against a framework
  • A clear account of where the evidence is thin, and where it is stronger than you have been giving yourself credit for
  • An Evidence Improvement Plan, ranked by what would change a decision rather than by what would be tidiest
  • Reporting templates you keep, use and edit without me

Everything is handed over editable and accessible. Nothing is delivered in a form that depends on me to maintain it.

Six daysThe minimum, not the target. It is what the work needs to be worth doing.
From £3,000Six days at the Tier 1 rate. Your tier is set by turnover, not by negotiation.
IndependentHeld outside the service and the budget being examined.
How it runs

Built with you, not handed to you

01

What you already hold

Your data, your reporting, and the knowledge sitting with your team, your board and the people you serve. Almost every organisation knows more than it has ever had time to gather in one place.

02

Making sense of it together

We work through it with you. What the evidence will support, what it will not, what is being assumed, and which gaps are findings in their own right rather than something to apologise for.

03

Something you can use on Monday

A ranked plan and a set of templates, sized to what you can realistically resource, not to what would look impressive in a report.

Being straight with you

What this is not

It is not an academic evaluation. If you need a randomised design or a peer-reviewable study, you need a research institution and a considerably larger budget, and I will tell you that in the first conversation rather than the last.

It is not a dashboard. Software rarely solves a measurement problem, and buying some before you know what you are trying to see usually makes the problem more expensive.

And it is not a reassurance exercise. If the evidence does not support what you were hoping it would, you will hear that, with care, in the room, and early enough to do something about it.

If any of that rules it out, say so and we will scope something that fits instead.

Worth an hour?

You do not need a scoped brief. If you can describe the feeling but not the cause, that is usually the right starting point, and a first conversation costs nothing.

Practical consultancy for public systems, commercial enterprises, founder-led organisations and community interest companies.

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hayley@thehayescollective.co.uk
Suffolk, working UK-wide
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Practical consultancy, lasting impact.