One of the early criticisms of outcomes was that organisations would find supporting evidence for these positive statements regardless of the reality of the situation and they would ignore everything else. This fear proved largely unfounded but keeping this potential pitfall in mind\u00a0isn’t\u00a0a bad idea. We must never allow our outcomes to become a strait jacket that prevents us from capturing the reality of our work.<\/p>\n
More and more funders are telling us that they don\u2019t want the reporting fairy tale: Once upon a time we did this and everyone lived happily ever after! They want the real picture of the difference their support is making<\/strong>\u2026 the successes, the challenges and the learning. Alongside expressing this desire some of the more progressive funders have started to address the issue of \u2018Funding Assurance\u2019. Working towards the \u201cHarmonising Reporting<\/a>\u201d principles, helping their funded organisations to improve their evaluation skills or simply being clear about what they want to know are just some of the ways that funders are responding to this key expressed challenge of voluntary organisations.<\/p>\n What we are really talking about here is trust and trust requires honesty from funder and funded alike. So when it comes to reporting\u2026 tell the whole story. Show the progress you have made towards achieving your outcomes, record and report on all unexpected outcomes from your work, talk about the challenges you faced along the way and critically\u2026 demonstrate the learning<\/strong> that will inform your future plans as well as your future evaluations.<\/p>\n Tom Scott<\/p>\n Tom is the Training Officer for Evaluation Support Scotland, a charity that works with voluntary organisations and funders so that they can evaluate what they do, learn from that evaluation and deliver better services. You can find evaluation tools, support guides and templates on the\u00a0ESS website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the early criticisms of outcomes was that organisations would find supporting evidence for these positive statements regardless of the reality of the situation and they would ignore everything else. This fear proved largely unfounded but keeping this potential pitfall in mind\u00a0isn’t\u00a0a bad idea. We must never allow our outcomes to become a strait … Continue reading Record the Unexpected<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/evalexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}