REF Impact Services

In this course, you’ll learn how to translate your goals public engagement goals into clear outcome statements and develop your evaluation plans. You’ll be equipped with practical tools and guidance to meaningfully understand and measure the quality of experience and impacts.

This course is organized to be completed at your own pace, with each Module comprising approx. 10-12 hours of learning tasks and activities.

This comprehensive evaluation training framed around public engagement impact includes:

Module 1: How to identify outcomes and develop an evaluation plan

Module 2: How to design a qualitative evaluation for your public engagement activity

Module 3: How to design a quantitative evaluation for your public engagement activity

Module 4: How to design a questionnaire to evaluate your public engagement activity

Cost: £16,500 / year for unlimited institutional subscription

Well-designed evaluations save time and money, delivering useful insights that enable evidence-based decisions. This hands-on training course provides practical guidance on how to refine the focus of an evaluation, ensuring that the scope and methods are realistic and robust.

This course covers the following topics:

– Laying the foundations for effective evaluation

– Getting to know the value of impact evaluation

– Distinguishing between output and outcomes

– Understanding the range of evaluation approaches and tools available to you

– How to develop your evaluation plan

– How to be an ethical evaluator

– Data consent and how it should be handled

– Understanding the range of evaluation approaches and tools available to you

– How to organize data for qualitative and quantitative analysis

By the end of this course, you will:

– Understand key concepts for evaluation, including ‘impact’.

– Be ready to articulate your ‘theory of change’.

– Be capable of translating your evaluation goals into clear, measurable outcomes that can be assessed.

– Be able to develop an evaluation plan based on available time and resources, as well as your evaluation goals.

– Make an informed decision about which type of evaluation approach and tool is most likely to be appropriate for evaluating your intended outcomes.

– Be able to apply basic ethical principles to your evaluation.

– Be able to effectively organize and store evaluation data.

– Make sure you are in line with GDPR rules.

Cost: £9,500 / year for unlimited institutional subscription

Ever wonder how to make a survey stand out and get accurate results? Badly designed surveys waste people’s time and introduce misinformation into organizations. This hands-on training course provides practical guidance on how to develop surveys in line with well-established best practices.

This course covers the following topics:

– Why use surveys for evaluation

– When you shouldn’t use surveys for evaluation

– How to develop a “good” survey question and response options

– Avoiding common pitfalls in survey design: How to spot a bad survey question and response options

– Using open-ended questions in your survey

– Using online, iPad-based, and automated surveys

– Pilot testing your survey

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

– Use basic principles of survey design to help you create good survey questions for evaluating public engagement outcomes.

– Develop the capability to identify problematic survey questions relating to public engagement evaluation.

– Prepare survey questions to measure public engagement outcomes that avoid the most obvious sources of bias.

– Determine how questionnaires might be used to evaluate public engagement impact.

– Explore how to systematically quantify open-ended questionnaire data.

Cost: £9,500 / year for unlimited institutional subscription

Live online workshop on Developing a theory of change. This workshop is designed to build on the self-paced training course (which has video content about theory of change), using a ‘flipped classroom’ model, with the practical work taking place in the live workshop. Here, the focus would be building on theories of change for REF impact case studies. This training is led by Prof. Eric Jensen. Cost for this three-hour live workshop would be £1950 (inclusive of VAT).

Live online workshop on Developing an evaluation framework. This workshop is designed to build on the self-paced training course (which has video content about theory of change), using a ‘flipped classroom’ model, with the practical work taking place in the live workshop. Here, the focus would be on development of an evaluation framework (or multiple project level evaluation frameworks). This training is led by Prof. Eric Jensen. Cost for this three-hour live workshop would be £1950 (inclusive of VAT).

See website (methodsforchange.org) for additional live workshop options, including Introduction to Evaluation and Introduction to Survey Design