Evaluation can help you to understand if, how and why your project or programme works. It helps you to learn from your successes and failures, deliver the best service for your users and demonstrate the value of what you do.
The Financial Capability Evaluation Toolkit focuses on measuring changes in people’s financial capability, understanding how your activity has led to those changes and using this learning to refine your programme.
It contains a set of resources (including Outcomes Frameworks) that you can use to plan and carry out your evaluation. It is based around three-steps, each with a short Overview that introduces key principles and a Tool or Template to get you started. You can download these below, and a selection of more detailed guidance from other sources is available from the Further Reading document, available on the right-hand side of this page.
Gain a clear understanding of your programme by developing a Theory of Change, which describes the activities that you will run and the changes in people’s financial attitudes, behaviours or well-being that you expect to happen as a result.
Map out the wider characteristics and context for your programme. Be clear about needs, the reasons for taking your approach, who you are trying to reach, and what other programmes operate in your area that overlap with yours.
Decide which aspects of financial capability you want to measure. Use your Theory of Change to identify the key Financial Capability outcomes, and investigate existing evidence to decide where to focus your efforts.
Choose the designs and methods for your evaluation. Use our outcomes frameworks to identify the right outcomes for the people you engage, and use our question banks to identify specific measures. A mix of other methods will help you to understand how and why your programme works.
Create an evaluation plan for how you will measure, capture, analyse and learn from information about your programme, linking everything to your evaluation questions.
Learn from your evaluation so that you can refine your programme or inform other decisions about your services, policies or priorities. Think about who in your organisation needs to learn, what information they need, and when they need it.
Share your evaluation, so others can benefit from what you have learnt, or so that you can demonstrate the impact of your work. Think about who will be interested, be creative in the way that you share - and add your evaluation to the Financial Capability Evidence Hub.
