What is the Evaluation Exchange?
The Evaluation Exchange brings together voluntary and community sector groups wanting to improve their capacity to evaluate their work, with postgraduate students and researchers who want to put their research and evaluation skills into practice in a real-life setting.
We work in different ways with different people depending on their needs. At the heart of everything we do is supporting organisations, students and researchers to work together, to break down barriers to accessing different evidence and build evaluation and research skills that work in the real world.
| Working with funders | Supporting organisations and teams | Opportunities for students |
|---|---|---|
| We work with funders to help them, and those they work with, embed evaluation and learning into their work, in a way that is suitable for everyone involved. | We work with organisations to design accessible, participatory evaluation approaches and to demonstrate impact. | We offer students and researchers hands-on experiences, applying academic skills to real-world challenges and working in collaboration with community organisations and teams. |
Interested in working with us? Get in touch.
Explore our work
Hear directly from the people we work with
In our short film, community organisations we’ve worked with, show how collaborative, inclusive evaluation can strengthen services, build confidence, and create meaningful impact. Evaluation Exchange 2021-22 (Film).
Explore our collection of stories and examples from some of the organisations who’ve taken part in the Evaluation Exchange.
Working with community partners
Take a look at our animation to learn how we delivered the Evaluation Exchange programme with partners in two London boroughs.
Co-producing evaluation in health
Read how a funded programme to embed co-production in evaluation across health-related initiatives in England invited us to work with them.
With partners, including lived-experience co-producers, we designed a learning programme tailored to the needs of those involved, including people with experience of homelessness, disability, and mental health conditions.
How do you measure social value?
See how Kentish Town Community Centre worked with us through our six week ‘Engage-Train-Consult’ programme to explore and measure the social value they create for the 25,000 people they support. Evaluation Training for Community Consultancy.
Use our resources
Guide to more inclusive and meaningful evaluation
For anyone who wants to approach evaluation in an inclusive and meaningful way. Our guide offers top-tips and easy-to-use tools that you can apply straight away.
Latest news
How can creative making help us understand life with neurological movement disorders?
25-Feb-26: Exploring everyday life with neurological movement disorders through clay making, and postcard based creative evaluation. Read the blog on LinkedIn.
Evaluation in brain tumour care: Finding accessible and meaningful approaches
10-Dec-25: Developing accessible evaluation approaches for creative workshops with people living with brain tumours. Read the blog on LinkedIn
People
Who we’ve worked with and what happened
The Evaluation Exchange is delivered with Compost London.
Women + Health provide complementary and alternative medicine therapies and counselling to support Camden residents and survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence.
Women + Health and UCL students worked together to map an overview of Women + Health’s services, outline current monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and develop a Theory of Change for the organisation.
Skills Enterprise supports vulnerable and marginalized residents, helping them to develop skills and secure suitable employment. Their interventions and support covers: Crisis support, skills building, getting job ready, community cohesion and volunteering.
The team worked together to develop a set of surveys for Skills Enterprise to evaluate the four core service areas outlined in their Theory of Change: welfare, community cohesion, digital skills, and employability.
Money A+E provides money advice and education to diverse ethnic communities through one-to-one advice, workshops and courses.
Together, the team reviewed and updated the organisation’s monitoring and evaluation processes. They focused on what would help Money A+E meet funder requirements in order to best deliver their projects. The collaboration resulted in a revised theory of change, and the identification of a new data collection system for the organisations’ educational data.
The Institute of Imagination (iOi) creates a space for children and young people of all backgrounds to develop their imaginations together. The goal of the iOi is to spark the imaginations of young audiences through highly interactive events, training, partnerships and research with sciences and digital technologies.
LinkThe team developed an organisational Theory of Change based on iOi’s new organisational strategy. The team reviewed existing evaluation approaches to help identify a series of core impact measures that could be used alongside the organisation’s new strategy.
Forest Gate Community Garden, in an economically deprived area of East London, is a haven for wildlife and residents. It welcomes local voluntary and school groups, runs workshops and holds community events. Over 40 local residents volunteer with the garden.
LinkForest Gate Community Garden wants the ethnic diversity of people engaging with the garden to reflect that of the local population. The team sought to understand which sections of the community are underrepresented and to identify potential strategies for increasing the diversity of users. They did this by reviewing the literature, surveying other London community gardens, talking to parents and interviewing community leaders.
Wac Arts provide high quality arts training for young people aged 5-26 years. Their mission is to empower young people to change their world through the arts.
The team worked together to review the evaluation tools being used by Wac Arts. They developed and tested accessible, simple methods to capture the outcomes from young people taking part in Wac Arts’ activities to evaluate the organisation’s four main aims across a range of programmes.
Street Storage provides people experiencing homelessness (including those sleeping out, in vulnerable housing situations, leaving violent home situations or in the prison system) with free, secure and accessible storage for their belongings.
LinkWe focused on developing simple tools for people using Street Storage’s services to feed back on the service. The aim was to find creative and non-intrusive ways to collate and collect data from a group for whom feedback on a service is not a priority - and for whom surveys and online forms are not an option.
Deafroots primary objective is to promote deaf awareness and to provide training and support to deaf and hard of hearing people to ensure preparedness for employment.
The team developed a workable and practical evaluation framework for Deafroots that captures key input, indicators and outcomes. To do this the team have designed and run feedback sessions with users of Deafroots’ services to uncover participants' motivation to attend programmes, their experience, what they take away from it, and what they feel they gained.
Kentish City Farm provides a vital green space for local people to connect with nature. They with people from different backgrounds in their activities, caring for the animals and the land. Their small staff team and volunteers run activities for older people, young people and early years groups.
The aim of the team's time together was to understand how Kentish Town City Farm serves the local community; and understand how the farm could support environmental education and community wellbeing.
Subco seeks to improve the lives of vulnerable Asian elders, their Carers and the local community in East London through an integrated programme.
Lifeafterhummus (LAH) Community Benefit Society provides a range of support to local residents in Somers Town including food parcels (made up from surplus food), referrals for debt advice, grants, care navigation, welfare rights, domestic violence and employability. LAH works alongside local partners and the Council in the London Borough of Camden.
Together, Lifeafterhummus (LAH) Community Benefit Society and the UCL students and researchers, developed and tested Social Return on Investment (SROI) as an evaluation method. The aim was to understand and quantify the social, environmental and economic value that LAH creates, crucially in a monetised form.
The world's first YMCA isa national charity that advances the education, health and wellbeing of communities. They break down barriers to create improved access to life changing opportunities. Their vision is to enable everyone to achieve their potential, live a fulfilled life and contribute positively to society.
The team created a Theory of Change for Central YMCA to help the organisation situate everything they do, in terms of activities and services, within a larger purpose.
Calthorpe Community Garden is an inner-city community garden that aims to improve physical and emotional well-being through different activities such as social and therapeutic horticulture, cooking classes and sport.
The team worked together to come up with a way to determine how the varied elements of the garden make a difference to the people using the garden. They developed and tested on-line questionnaires and also helped develop a video of ‘why people love Calthorpe’.
Explore our outputs
Browse our list of publications and videos.
Reimagining Evaluation is a practical guide for anyone who wants to approach evaluation in an inclusive and meaningful way. The guide offers easy-to-use tools that you can apply straight away.
- The Evaluation Exchange highly commended at UCL East Engagement Awards
- Building skills and creating impact: Evaluation Training for Community Consultancy
- Recognising & celebrating the energy that is created: Street Storage & The UCL Volunteering Awards
- A celebration: The Evaluation Exchange 2021/22
- What is the long-lasting impact of participating in the Evaluation Exchange? Previous UCL students share their experience.
- Making time for evaluation and learning: top tips when resources are tight
- Blogs from the Evaluation Exchange pilot
- Evaluation Exchange taster sessions for voluntary and community sector organisations
- Why cross disciplinary work is crucial for building researchers' skills and expertise
- The Evaluation Exchange launches in Newham
- Working with an organisation undergoing transition
- Ready, set, go! The Evaluation Exchange has launched in Camden
- Evaluation Exchange: Reflecting and Adapting to Constant Change in Social Enterprises
- Evaluation Exchange: There's a place you can go
- Evaluation Exchange: Deaf Community Empowerment and Campaigning
- Ideas to actions: the Evaluation Exchange
- Evaluation Exchange: Kentish Town City Farm
- Evaluation Exchange: Supporting Vulnerable Residents in Diverse Communities
- Evaluation Exchange: Women + Health
- Evaluation Exchange: designing surveys to capture the support 'Skills Enterprise' offers in Newham
- Evaluation Exchange: Lifeafterhummus
- Evaluation Exchange: Wac Arts empowering young people to change their world through the arts
- Evaluation Exchange: Who are Street Storage?
- Evaluation Exchange: Calthorpe Community Garden - Relax, Play, Eat
- Evaluation Exchange: UCL students collaborate with community health inequalities project: Evaluation Exchange
- Bringing compassion into public project evaluation: the UCL Evaluation Exchange
- The UCL Evaluation Exchange & the Co-production Collective announce collaboration
- New film features Evaluation Exchange and the impact of digital skills in change making
- Applications open for funding and support for evaluation and co-production
- Getting creative: the Evaluation Exchange x Trellis collaboration
- Evaluating differently: Supporting projects to co-produce evaluations
- People-centred evaluation: Putting it into practice
- What is The Evaluation Exchange? (Animation)
- Evaluation Exchange 2021-22 (Film)
- Victoria, from Caritas Anchor House in Newham, shares what she and her organisation gained from the Evaluation Exchange
- Anne and Aradhna, UCL students, talk about their experience of the Evaluation Exchange
- Money A+E: The team share their experience
- Evaluation Training for Community Consultancy