Better Together Evaluation & Dashboard
How our three-year Evaluation and Impact Dashboard supported a partnership project to prove its impact and secure more funding.
Six micro-charities supporting people with rare bone marrow failures came together to pool their resources and reach more people than they ever could alone. The Better Together partnership wanted to help people affected by these conditions to feel better informed, less isolated, and more resilient through delivering wellbeing support activities, events and better information and advice.
Insley Consulting helped Better Together to plan their project evaluation, which helped to secure over half a million pounds of funding from The National Lottery Community Fund; we were delighted to be appointed the evaluation and learning partner for the three-year pilot project.
The Challenge
“The partnership was looking for an expert – we needed to collect data in a meaningful way so that we could accurately report on our impact. Insley Consulting definitely delivered on this: we ended up with a Monitoring & Evaluation Framework and Toolkit that everyone was happy with and that has been consistently implemented by all the partners.”
Claire Baggott
Better Together for Healthy Bone Marrow Project Manager
The Solution
Insley Consulting worked in close collaboration with the Better Together delivery team and the six partners to:
- Co-create a Monitoring & Evaluation Framework and Toolkit that suited the different activities and partner needs.
- Embed the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Toolkit by building the capacity of the project delivery team through regular meetings, who in turn built the capacity of partners to roll out the tools.
- Deliver yearly evaluation reports with clear recommendations to improve project delivery throughout the three years.
- Develop an Impact Dashboard to support the continuous improvement of the project and facilitate access to outcomes data for management, fundraising and communications purposes.
The Better Together partnership took on the evaluation feedback and made adjustments to the project as it unfolded. As the project evolved, so did the evaluation – M&E tools were adjusted or new ones created when necessary.
The Result
Through working with Insley Consulting, Better Together now has:
- A clear and practical Monitoring & Evaluation Framework and Toolkit that have been tried and tested, which all partners can keep using to collect robust and comparable data throughout the lifetime of the project.
- A user-friendly and easily accessible Impact Dashboard with all the relevant quantitative and qualitative M&E data – this saves the delivery team and partners’ time in communications and fundraising activities.
- Robust evidence of the difference the project has made to partners and individuals.
The successful delivery of the first phase of the project, coupled with evidence of the outcomes achieved and how change happened, has been instrumental in the Better Together partnership being awarded three-year continuation funding by The National Lottery Community Fund to continue delivering their activities.
What was Insley Consulting like to work with?
“Emma played an important role and always brought a lot of value and energy. She was a really valuable sounding board to the delivery team and the partners when we were thinking about how to better implement aspects of the project evaluation. She was very responsive and supportive – having this flexibility when we needed it was important to get everyone’s buy-in.”
Claire Baggott, Better Together for Healthy Bone Marrow Project Manager
“It is such a high impact project, and it has been wonderful to have tools and data to demonstrate that with confidence. This evaluation has supported the success of the project because we can confidently talk about the difference that we made to partners and people with rare bone marrow failures, which has been phenomenal.”
Claire Baggott
Better Together for Healthy Bone Marrow Project Manager
Further Reading
You can read more about the Better Together for Healthy Bone Marrow project here.