Helen Highley shares how consultancy Brightpurpose have been evaluating the Foundation’s work to strengthen local services and systems in six communities across England and Wales.
21 November 2023
Helen Highley, founder and Director of Brightpurpose, an evaluation and organisational development consultancy, has been leading Brightpurpose’s work as learning partner and developmental evaluator to Lloyds Bank Foundation’s Communities Team, and authored the report Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities. Below she shares how Brightpurpose have been evaluating the Foundation’s work to strengthen local services and systems in six communities across England and Wales.
Since 2019, Lloyds Bank Foundation has been working with six communities: Bolsover, Great Yarmouth, Halton, Merthyr Tydfil, Redcar and Cleveland, and Telford and Wrekin. In each of these communities, the Foundation has brought together public and private organisations, academic institutions, and people who live locally, to explore new ways of strengthening small charities and designing and resourcing local services to better support people facing complex issues.
Brightpurpose has been observing and evaluating the Foundation’s approach and helping the Foundation’s Communities Team to apply learnings.
Lloyds Bank Foundation’s Communities Team ('the Team') was created to innovate. Its purpose is to explore and facilitate new ways of strengthening small charities and designing and resourcing local services. The ultimate goal is to develop stronger, more sustainable services for people facing complex challenges.
Innovation involves trying new things, learning quickly from both successes and failures, and applying that learning to what comes next. This needs an evaluation approach that reflects the developmental and experimental nature of the work.
It would have been premature to use process or impact evaluation approaches, when the Team is still exploring what the work actually looks like. Instead, the Team needed a developmental evaluation: an agile approach that uses evaluation methodologies, organisational development models, facilitation and rapid feedback to support the Team in learning, adapting and shaping the work with communities.
Developmental evaluation is characterised by close involvement of the evaluator with the Team and their partners, so they can observe and evaluate their new approaches in real time, and to support them in applying the learning.
Throughout our time working together, we have met with the Team regularly to help them reflect on how things are going, what they are learning and what they should do next. We have also observed how the work is unfolding in each community and gathered feedback from local partners and community members. We share these insights with the Team when we meet to support their reflection and planning.
We use a metaphor to describe our role as developmental evaluators, of holding a torch at the Team’s feet so that they can decide where to go next. There have been times, such as when the Covid-19 lockdown began and planned in-person work became impossible, when it felt like we all needed to just sit in the dark for a few days. But then we switched on the torch again and facilitated the Team to work out how to move forward in a suddenly changed world.
Our frequent reflection and feedback sessions enable the Team to notice when a challenge is becoming a recurring or consistent theme. These are the learning themes you can read about in our report, Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities. When a learning theme crops up in more than one community, or keeps coming back to the surface after seemingly being addressed, we have a consistent theme on our hands. It may not look exactly the same at first glance, but if we dig a little deeper we often find similar characteristics.
The Team identified a blocker to progress in one of the communities. Local partners expressed it too, but nothing happened. The Team debated whether to raise this issue in their role as a ‘critical friend’. They decided not to intervene, out of concern for wielding their power inappropriately as a funder and interfering without sufficient local understanding. Eventually, the issue was resolved locally, but in conversations with local partners afterwards it became clear that the Team’s intervention would have been welcomed, and may have helped the local community reach a resolution much faster.
We reflected with the Team afterwards that speaking the hard truths is one of their important contributions to this work. Between them, the Team members and the local people we are funding to support the work (known as Local Implementation Leads) share decades of experience of working collaboratively to make local change happen – when their intuition tells them something needs to be said, it probably does. They have built trusting relationships with local partners and have been invited to act as a fresh pair of eyes and a critical friend.
As a result, the Team are now more confident to highlight issues as they see them, albeit raising in the spirit of curiosity: “I’ve noticed this, and I’m wondering if you see it too?”
Just like the Team’s work, the developmental evaluation continues to evolve. We are now working more closely alongside the six communities, supporting them to develop their local learning and evaluation approaches. Three of the six communities have defined their long-term visions for success – the North Star to guide their work. We are helping them to define their strategic learning questions and evaluation plans, so that they can learn in real-time as they work together to change their corners of the world.
