The Evaluation Exchange

We are a partnership between UCL and the voluntary and community sector that aims to improve evaluation practice.

UCL Evaluation Exchange poster December 2022

9 November 2023

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.

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To find out why we run the programme, watch our animation. To learn about how organisations, students and researchers have recently benefited, watch our film.

News from the Evaluation Exchange

27th September 2024: Building skills and creating impact: Evaluation Training for Community Consultancy

New training from The Evaluation Exchange in partnership with the Kentish Town Community Centre taught UCL students how to design and manage evaluation projects tailored to community organisations, applied in a real-world setting.

Read the news story on the IEDE website

6th March 2024: People-centred evaluation: Putting it into practice

As UCL explores potential partnership opportunities with international development organisation VSO, the Evaluation Exchange invites Dr Alok Rath, VSO’s Global Head of Knowledge, Evidence and Learning to share his experience of putting people-centric and action-oriented evaluation approaches in to practice in Africa and Asia.

Read the blog

Students and researchers: Why should I get involved?

An opportunity for you and those you work with

The Evaluation Exchange is an opportunity for you to enhance your research and evaluation skills outside of a university setting - a real world application of your knowledge that has the potential to make a difference to the workings of voluntary and community sector organisations. You will help embed the use of successful evaluation approaches leading to a lasting change in practice and making a valued contribution to an organisation.

You will also be meeting and connecting with individuals outside of the university, establishing a new network. You will enhance your research and evaluation skills, tap into the workings of community and voluntary sector organisations, and have the opportunity to enhance your experience outside of the typical university setting.

Read about the key impacts and lessons learnt from the Evaluation Exchange 2017/18, Evaluation Exchange 2021/22 and watch our film.

Organisations: Why should I get involved?

An opportunity for you and those you work with

The Evaluation Exchange aims to help voluntary and community organisations, in Camden and Newham, build evaluation and learning into their work. By matching you to a team of UCL researchers, you will work collaboratively with them to tackle your evaluation challenge. Working together you can develop appropriate learning systems that help you understand what is going well and not so well and demonstrate the value of your organisation’s services. The team of researchers matched to your organisation will have a variety of backgrounds and interests and will be keen to learn from you too.

Watch our film featuring organsations who have already been involved.

Support

We can help you think through whether your evaluation challenge is appropriate for the Evaluation Exchange. If you would like to discuss your idea please get in touch.

Our training