Developmental evaluation

Social innovation usually means you’re treading new ground. In order to make changes to a complex system, you need new approaches – otherwise things would already have changed. Developmental evaluation supports you to innovate, byenabling you to continue experimenting and shaping a programme as you deliver it.

The new approaches you are testing will rely on new ways of working and new partnerships. These all add complexity to the process, and need to be carefully examined to understand what makes them work and how they need to be improved. This requires a very agile approach to evaluation that relies less on formal and infrequent intervals of data collection and analysis, and more on continued dialogue, real-time analysis, reflection and rapid feedback loops.

We’ve been doing this for over a decade , so we know the path well. Our job is to walk alongside you as you test new approaches, and bring you insights to help you understand what’s happening and where to go next. Bringing together our expertise in evaluation, organisational development and learning partnership, we translate those insights into practical advice on how to design your next steps, and create the right conditions for innovation. There’s no such thing as failure; only learning.