Our service and product offerings build on established consulting and investment thinking and draw on a broad and ever-increasing experience base. Our focus is to help our clients gain clear insight and tangible measures of the impacts of their investments, and to quickly enhance their evaluation capability. Typically, our involvement requires only a brief engagement.
We are committed to working quickly and effectively with clients of all sizes - from small and medium organisations operating on limited budgets (such as charities, SME's and NGO's), to large private, not-for-profit and public sector organisations.
We offer several distinct benefits:
- We aim to quickly pass on knowledge to allow clients to act independently
- We combine a range of perspectives to determine impact, including quantified cost-benefit and performance analysis, performance indicator correlations and structured analysis of anecdotes
- We do not dance "the dance of the seven veils" in offering knowledge, tools and materials
- Our knowledge base has been built up not only from experience but also through extensive thought leading, knowledge sharing and research
- We specialise in return on investment, impact assessment and soft skill programme evaluation - this is what we do.
Furthermore, our approach to impact assessment and evaluation offers several distinct advantages over traditional approaches to assessing Return on Investment:
- The approach doesn't assume that any initiative occurs in a vacuum, but recognises that many factors usually impact on individuals' development and performance (e.g. beyond learning and behaviour change)
- Evaluation can be restricted to a single programme or initiative, or quite easily extended to consider an department's entire portfolio
- Evaluation isn't focused on financial returns or measures which are of exclusive interest to commercial organisations
- Evaluation may normally be linked to programme design, annual budget planning and/or balanced scorecard or other tools for assessing organisational performance
- Our approach doesn't require control group comparisons (where one group participating in an initiative is compared against another which has not)
- Similarly, studies can be undertaken where an initiative was launched on the basis of broad expectations of benefit rather than specific pre-defined goals (many coaching initiatives fall into this category)
- The approach avoids lengthy "number crunching" and assumption making
- The outputs of evaluation are intended to be useful as well as informative - explaining why impacts are being felt, as well as the "what?". Insights to help inform future programme design are derived.
The approach doesn't contradict the familiar "four levels model" for learning evaluation developed by Donald Kirkpatrick, however takes a different starting point.
Click here to discover how our approach and the Kirkpatrick method correspond.
Click here to find out more about what we do.
