Our resources, training and advice are designed to help places to decide whether impact evaluation is right for their project and to design and commission robust impact evaluations that improve understanding of the effects of local economic growth policies.
Different types of evaluations answer different questions. At What Works Growth, we focus mainly on impact evaluations. Impact evaluations assess whether an intervention – such as a business support scheme – has made a difference to an outcome – such as business survival.
Currently, the impact evaluation evidence on most local economic growth policies is limited, which impedes policymakers’ ability to make evidence-based decisions. Addressing this will require more local economic growth policies to be evaluated.
Impact evaluation isn’t always possible, or appropriate for all projects. In these cases, many of our resources can still be useful in developing plans for monitoring and evaluation.
GUIDANCE ON HOW TO EVALUATE
How to evaluate
We offer a helping hand for places wanting to design and commission robust impact evaluations.
Understanding impact evaluation
Our introductory guide to impact evaluation helps policymakers understand the basics of impact evaluation and its uses, including what impact evaluation is, why it is important, when it is appropriate and some key elements to think about impact evaluation in practice.
We recommend that policymakers use previous examples to help them design evaluations. Select the ‘How to’ resources filter in our resource library to access our evaluation case studies.
We provide training to help policymakers develop their evaluation skills. All our training courses are free. We also work with organisations to develop and deliver custom evaluation training for their staff.
Since 2014, 11 English city-regions have agreed devolution deals with government and more devolution deals will be agreed in coming years. This briefing aims to help policymakers think through the feasibility of evaluating the impact of devolution as a whole.
Designing local growth policies to facilitate robust programme-level impact evaluation
Programme-level evaluation assesses the overall impact of the programme on its intended outcomes. This briefing outlines four features that would help make programme-level impact evaluation possible.
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