Evaluation guidance - sharing your findings

After all your hard work planning your project, measuring your outcomes, analysing your evidence, and writing your evaluation, it’s important to share your findings so that others can learn from your project. Here are some ideas of ways you can do that.

It’s important to share your evaluation within your organisation in order to celebrate your achievements. Hearing about the project’s impact can help your staff to feel more confident in their work and motivate them to deliver similar projects in the future. Additionally, the evaluation can help your organisation to review and improve its ways of working.

When sharing your evaluation internally, you should first think about who your audience is. Are you sharing it with all staff or only the project team? With delivery staff, management, trustees, or all of the above? You should tailor your message differently for each audience in order to ensure that it is interesting and relevant to their roles. Depending on the findings of your evaluation, you may also need to communicate it in way that is sensitive to your audience. For example, if your evaluation found that the delivery staff needed more training on working with children experiencing challenging circumstances, you will need to think about how to communicate this finding tactfully to them.

Next, you should consider the best way to share your findings in order to get your message across most effectively and engage your audience. For example, if you want to talk through the evaluation in detail with your project team in order to plan for the next project, you can ask people to read through the evaluation individually and come prepared to discuss it in a team meeting. If you’re most interested in sharing your findings widely in order to keep staff updated about your organisation’s achievements, you can highlight the key points in an all-staff newsletter.

It’s also important to share your evaluation with your project partners. Strong evidence of impact can help them to more clearly see the value of the partnership and motivate them to work with you again on similar projects. The evaluation can also be a useful way for your organisations to reflect on the strength of the partnership and how you can improve your partnership working in the future.

Depending on the group of participants you worked with, it may also be appropriate to share your evaluation with them (either in full or just part of it). If you’re sharing your evaluation with participants, you should think carefully about how best to present these findings in a way that is sensitive to their feelings and needs. You might also think about how your evaluation can support you in recruiting future participants: how can you best communicate the difference that your project can make in their lives, using language that will resonate with them?

Sharing your evaluation with the wider music education sector can help support learning and improve practice in other organisations, ultimately leading to better outcomes for children and young people in challenging circumstances. A great way to reach a wide audience across the sector is to write a blog post about your findings for the Youth Music Network – it’s a funding requirement for Youth Music grantholders to post at least once on the site during their project, so whilst you aren’t obliged to post about your evaluation findings, you could use this as an opportunity to share them with other grantholders if you wish!

You can also think about other places where people who will be interested in your work are likely to turn for professional knowledge and resources. For example, you could write for websites or publications that are relevant to the focus of your project, or you could present your findings in person at a Music Education Hub steering group meeting or sector-wide conference. In deciding how to share your findings across the sector, think carefully about your key message and target audience, and choose the most suitable way to share this message with them.

Your evaluation can be a useful tool for demonstrating the impact of your work to other current and potential funders aside from Youth Music. Most funders will ask that you report back at the end of your project, and providing robust evidence of impact can reassure them that your grant was money well spent. You can draw on your findings in future funding applications as evidence of impact, which can help convince funders that your work will continue to make a difference in the future.

Additionally, you can share key findings from your evaluation with the general public to help raise awareness of your work and contribute to your organisation’s wider fundraising effects. This might include highlighting your impact on your website, flyers and social media. You could write a press release to generate publicity for your organisation in the local media. For more advice on this topic, see Youth Music’s guide to writing a press release.