Why Strong Evaluation Matters for Real Project Impact

Over the past decade working across heritage, wellbeing, and community development, I have seen a pattern that is hard to ignore. Many projects are full of passion, skill, and genuine commitment to helping people thrive, yet they fall short when it comes to showing funders the true value of their work. It is never because they lack impact. It is almost always because they lack meaningful evaluation.

Too often, evaluation becomes something that organisations feel they must complete to satisfy a requirement rather than an opportunity to understand what is working and why. A few comments on a feedback form, a short reflection at the end of an event, or a general statement that people enjoyed themselves is seen as enough. These tokenistic attempts might complete a funding report, but they do very little to demonstrate long-term change or support future investment.

Funders such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Historic England, and many others are increasingly clear about what they want to see. They are not looking for decorative evaluation. They want evidence that is relevant, robust, and rooted in real outcomes. They want to understand how projects improve wellbeing, strengthen communities, and create lasting social value. They want data that relates directly to their strategic outcomes and national frameworks, such as the Green Book or the Valuing Culture and Heritage Capital model.

This shift is not about bureaucracy. It is about accountability. Funders have a responsibility to ensure that public money is used effectively and that the projects they support produce genuine and sustained benefit. Meaningful evaluation helps them see that impact clearly.

But evaluation is also a gift to delivery organisations. When it is designed well, it helps teams understand who they are reaching, what experiences people are having, and where improvements can be made. It helps clarify a project’s purpose and demonstrate its strengths. It provides language and evidence that can be used in future bids, policy conversations, and community engagement. It turns instinct and anecdote into something that can be confidently shared and celebrated.

Evaluation becomes powerful when it is grounded in real frameworks, clear theories of change, and validated tools. It becomes useful when it is planned from the beginning, not added as an afterthought. And it becomes transformative when it captures both the nuance of personal experience and the clarity of measurable outcomes.

This is particularly important in the wellbeing space. Many projects aim to improve confidence, connection, identity, purpose, or resilience, but use measures that are not aligned with those outcomes. Others rely on wellbeing scales without understanding what those scales actually assess. This makes it hard to show funders that the project has delivered the change it set out to achieve.

When organisations invest in strong, relevant evaluation, the picture changes completely. They build trust with funders. They secure future funding more easily. They learn more about their participants. They design better projects. And most important of all, they honour the people they serve by taking their experiences seriously.

Tokenistic evaluation might tick a box, but it does not build the kind of evidence that shapes the future of a project or strengthens a sector. The difference between a project that survives and a project that grows often comes down to how well it can articulate its impact.

My hope is that more organisations begin to see evaluation not as a task to complete, but as a foundation for learning and long-term sustainability. When we take evaluation seriously, we give funders confidence, we give communities a stronger voice, and we give ourselves the opportunity to build work that lasts.

If we want funders to invest in meaningful change, we must be ready to evidence meaningful change. Strong evaluation is not a burden. It is a responsibility, and it is also one of the most powerful tools we have for building better, more impactful projects.