This is partly to do with initiatives feeling they need to demonstrate the value of PB to sceptics (especially in uncertain financial and political times) in order to be more sustainable and partly because of the national evaluation being done by SQW.

Most PB initiatives now produce some kind of evaluation, although the focus, quality and type vary significantly.  However, initial outcomes are emerging, providing some interesting data. 

Evaluation is certainly something that we, at the PB Unit, have been thinking about and working on for a while now too.  Local evaluations seemed to be so different from each other that it was impossible to develop any kind of comparison for a national picture.  We also knew that because there’s no requirement on initiatives to do any kind of evaluation that anything we produced for people to complete and return to us had to be something that was also useful and helpful for them.

So over quite a long period of time, and after asking a number of different stakeholders, we, with Heather Blakey at ICPS, started to develop an approach to developing meaningful evaluation locally, with the resources available.  We’re currently testing this and the tools we developed with initiatives, to see if it works.  The purpose of the approach is to enable initiatives to develop their own evaluation framework that’s relevant to their local context, whilst still providing a level of information to the PB Unit that could be comparable across areas.  But its primary focus is developing a local evaluation. 

Entirely separate to this, CLG decided to do a national evaluation and commissioned SQW to do it.  SQW are now about to publish their interim report which provides the baseline, which they’ll build upon and look at changes over time in the next phase.  SQW developed a logic framework for the evaluation, and the primary focus of their tools is comparison data, which is what’s needed for a national evaluation, however, it makes the tools less useful in isolation, locally.  The evaluation, will, hopefully, provide a national snapshot of PB and identify some of the emerging outcomes and areas for improvement. 

In yet another project, Involve are looking at the business case for different participation activities.  They are researching costs and benefits in a fairly broad approach to demonstrate the value of participation.  This research is just starting but has the potential to be quite useful both locally and nationally to make the case for PB.  Similarly Community Development Foundation are putting together research on the value of empowerment and making the case for empowerment. 

We definitely welcome the evaluation activities that are going on and hope that our own contribution is helpful and welcome locally as well as nationally.  Robust and meaningful evaluation that demonstrates the value of PB is something that is most definitely needed, especially in the current economic climate.