Alice Williams MBE, Founder, Luminary Bakery
What did you like most about the sessions and why?
The opportunity to think critically about our impact, what we’re trying to achieve, what’s working and what we need to do better. Especially being able to do that with impact and data experts who also have experience of front-line delivery – it was the perfect mix of expertise to guide us through our ‘Theory of Change’ and processes to make us as efficient and effective as possible.
What was the area you found most challenging and why?
The process is essentially pulling apart something you’ve built so that can be a little painful, but it was facilitated in an encouraging and respectful way – always with the focus of reflecting on what we’ve achieved impact-wise, learning from that and from best practice elsewhere, and moving forwards even better, to serve our beneficiaries best!
Practically, it was difficult to fit in everything we needed to unpack but the Resurgo team were good at keeping us on track. We are so grateful that Pete and Sam are data experts … They really listened to what we needed on that and offered additional time to create this for us which they didn’t have to do.
Looking at all the content that was covered, which part do you feel will make the most difference to your organisation?
Data collection methods, it sounds boring but it’s key – we’re now capturing what we need to, and it will make a huge difference to us being able to spot trends, pivot where necessary and report better. And it will help our support workers to feel more job satisfaction, because we are documenting the women’s progress better!
To what extent did you feel that you achieved your objectives for the sessions?
We achieved almost everything we hoped, but it was too optimistic of us to think we would be able to explore our programme design fully and wrap up all things impact in a few months! It has been an amazing start and set us up well, but we have more to do and are keen to keep impact evaluation at the forefront going forward. Each session has specific objectives and we definitely met these.