Creative Evaluation
Stop guessing whether your work made a difference. Build a method that shows it.
This tool walks you through six steps to design a creative evaluation method for your project, session, or event. By the end you will have a complete, printable method record – what you will do, why it will work for your group, how to run it, and exactly what to do with the evidence afterwards.
What you will end up with
- A draft creative evaluation method tailored to your project
- A step-by-step facilitation guide you could hand to a colleague
- A one-sentence impact statement ready to drop into any report or funding application
◆ Nothing you enter is stored or sent to our servers
Progress
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1
What you will do
Describe your evaluation method
The specific activity you will use to gather evidence – not the project itself, but the evaluation method embedded within it.
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Be concrete – what does this look like in the room? What are people doing with their hands, voices, or attention?
✦ Creative evaluation activities – pick one to adapt
At the start, end, midway, after every session?
List everything – room layout, objects, paper, permission forms, recording equipment.
2
The reasoning
Why this method, for these participants?
Not what participants do – but why doing it will generate honest, useful evidence from this specific group in this specific context.
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Think about your specific group. Why will this method work better than a standard questionnaire for the people you are working with? What do you know about them that makes this the right approach?
✦ Reasons creative methods work – pick one that fits your group
Access needs, language, trust levels, experience of formal evaluation, digital literacy – anything that affects how you will adapt the method.
✦ Common adaptations – pick what applies to your group
3
Step by step
How you will run it
Detailed enough that a colleague could run this if you were not there.
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How will you frame what you are doing without making people feel surveyed or assessed?
✦ What a good evaluation intro covers – use as a checklist
Add 3-5 steps. Be specific enough that someone else could follow them.
✦ Step sequences – pick one to use as a starting point
What signals the evaluation is complete? How do you transition back to the group?
✦ Ways to close an evaluation activity
4
What you will capture
Evidence – what it is and how you will keep it
The specific evidence this method generates in your project and exactly what you will do with it before it disappears.
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Spell out the link – what does this evidence show about whether your outcome was reached?
✦ Ways to connect evidence to outcomes – adapt to your project
Be specific – who does what, within what timeframe, stored where.
✦ Post-session capture routines – pick one that fits your context
5
Making it count
How you will share your evidence
Evidence only counts if it reaches the people who need to see it. Plan your reporting format now, before the session happens – and think beyond the written report.
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The one thing that will be lost if you do not get it in the moment.
✦ In-the-moment reporting hacks – pick your most useful one
Think about format, audience, and what suits the evidence you have gathered. You can choose more than one.
Written
Visual
Audio
Video
Digital
Written report
Visual report
Audio report
Video report
Digital report
Giving evidence back to the people who created it is good practice – and often produces further insight. How and when will you do this?
Social media, an event, a press release, an exhibition – anything beyond your immediate funder or organisation.
6
The headline
Your one-sentence report
Fill in the blanks. This goes at the top of any report or funding application – it names what changed, for whom, and implies you have evidence.
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As specific as you can be about who this is for.
✦ Shift / feeling examples – adapt the wording to your project
An observable action or behaviour – not a feeling, but something that happened as a result.
✦ Concrete change examples – adapt to what happened in your project
Your impact sentence will form here as you fill in the three fields above.
7
Finally
Name your method
You have built it – now give it a name. It does not need to be formal. Something that means something to you and your team is enough.
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This will appear at the top of your method record.
Tip: open the emailed link on a desktop or laptop browser, then use File > Print > Save as PDF for the cleanest result.
Send your method record to your inbox
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