Join us to explore theories of change and how to put them into action to transform the way you understand, implement, and evaluate how your work makes a difference to the people and communities you care about.
Are you a programme leader in a third sector or public sector organisation looking to tell a better story of your organisation’s impact?
Do you want to make evidence-informed decisions and build a culture of continuous learning and improvement?
Perhaps you’re tasked with developing a theory of change for your work or reporting on an existing one.
This is a webinar for you!
What we’ll cover:
A theory of change is not as grand as it sounds – it’s just a term that refers to making explicit the thinking behind why a programme, project or intervention will make a difference to the people or communities it seeks to serve.
A theory of change focuses on what’s important for the people and communities you care about: it sets out – or maps – how the activities your initiative delivers are going to contribute to the outcomes and impacts that are important to them.
This is especially effective for complex change where numbers alone can’t demonstrate the difference your work makes, and where people are at the heart of change.
Every initiative has a theory of change – they just aren’t always made explicit or written down.
We’ll talk about the process of collaborating to generate a shared understanding of how your initiative makes change in the world, and introduce different approaches to generating theories of change, with a focus on practical ways of doing this you can apply in your own setting.
At Matter of Focus, we’ve helped more than 150 projects, programmes and organisations to map, track and report on how the activities they deliver reach the outcomes that are important to them.
We know that theories of change can be useful tools for understanding, learning, monitoring and evaluation, and as a communication tool to share your work and its potential impact with stakeholders.
We’ll share how to apply theories of change in your day-to-day work so that you can build capacity to learn and improve.
Through showcasing successful theories of change across various scales – from small projects to large-scale strategic initiatives – we will look at how organisations have designed and used theories of change and evolved them to suit changing circumstances.
The work to develop and use a theory of change improves efficiency, effectiveness and the ability to attract funding. Creating and using this approach helps foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement. It can also become a cornerstone for evidence-informed decision-making, making sure you stay focused on what matters, deliver the best work you can, and are able to demonstrate your impact.
Programme leaders, project managers, decision-makers, and change-makers from third sector and public sector organisations who want to make the best difference they can and understand their impact.
Please register to join us live and to receive a link to the recording.
Our next live webinar, on 28 November, will be about helping you get to grips with understanding and working well with the unique context of your work. Sign up to our mailing list to receive a notification of when this webinar goes live for registration.
Green Health Prescribing is an approach that supports people to engage in nature-based activities which offer solutions to improve physical and mental health outcomes, as well as reducing social isolation and improving community cohesion.
The aims of this evaluation were to use the available data and evidence to understand the Project’s ability to:
This report sets out the background and development of the Midlothian Green Health Prescribing Project. It presents a summary of the key learnings and impacts of this work based on evidence gathered by the project stakeholders and through additional data collection.
A series of next steps were also identified by the project team, to progress this work further in Midlothian and spread the approach to other areas.
You can also view this report on the NHS Lothian Green Health website, where you can find out more information about their work.
In 2020, the Scottish Government Cashback for Communities granted funding to includem to provide an early intervention service in West Dunbartonshire. This service aimed to help children and young people aged 10 to 15 who were felt to be at risk of offending, and their families. The service had six key outcomes.
Matter of Focus is the evaluation partner for this work. In collaboration with includem, we produced this impact report for the service’s third year. It draws together evaluative evidence gathered by includem, along with independent data collection, and guided by the Matter of Focus approach.
This report can also be viewed on the Cashback for Communities website, where you can learn more about their work with includem.
We carried out an independent evaluation of the Life Changes Trust Advisory Group (Young People with Care Experience Programme), co-commissioned by the Trust alongside the young Advisors.
Find out more, read the report and watch the online learning event
This report employs the Matter of Focus approach to outcome mapping and evaluation to show how the programme established and ran a lived experience Forum to build community and positively influence policy change around gambling harms in Scotland.
Drawing on their prior experience in engaging people with lived experience in policy influence, the ALLIANCE established the Forum. They created as a safe and welcoming environment for members to work together and gain access to new opportunities for involvement, and to act as a focal point for the emerging wider gambling harms movement within Scotland.
Through its extensive networks, the ALLIANCE has given a platform to the priorities of Forum members and has shared these findings with a wide range of stakeholders. This wide reach has raised awareness of gambling harms and its impacts amongst professionals working across sectors. There is evidence that this work is galvanising professionals in this space alongside people with lived experience to form a wider movement for change.
Using the Matter of Focus framework and our software OutNav, this report captures the our evaluation findings and recommendations. It highlights evidence of the programme’s effectiveness in building a co-produced movement around gambling harms and in influencing decision makers.
The report is also hosted on the ALLIANCE website, where you can learn more about this work.
In East Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership’s pilot Peer Support Service, people with their own lived experience of mental health or addiction recovery worked closely with people using services as their peers.
Read more about this work and our independent evaluation of the pilot.
About Dementia is Age Scotland’s Forum for improving the lives of people living with dementia and the unpaid carers of people living with dementia.
We produced this impact briefing based on four years of supporting About Dementia. The purpose is to communicate the learning from this programme to decision-makers and practitioners who support people living with dementia in their communities.
About Dementia has an important story to share, on bridging the very different worlds of people’s day-to-day experiences of dementia and policy-making. The story of the programme is also the story of the growth of a strong, vibrant and diverse community of people living with dementia/providing unpaid care, bringing their knowledge by experience, talents and skills to the task of making things better for themselves and others.
Age Scotland’s Dementia Training team works to raise awareness of dementia and improve practice among services. Working alongside the team and drawing on evidence they collected throughout their work, we produced a report which details how the project developed in its third year.
Health and social care services are under pressure like never before, with an ageing population, real time cuts in service and incredible demands as people live longer with more complex and long-term conditions.
It’s not surprising that people are turning to digital and data-driven approaches as a way of improving services: they want to increase efficiencies and improve the experiences of using services and make sure people are involved in decisions that affect them.
Digital tools offer promising potential solutions but they come with challenges too. They can be expensive to develop and hard to implement in real world settings, especially because they need to involve lots of people and systems.
So, when we are trying to understand if they bring the benefits we hope, it’s important to evaluate the interventions themselves (e.g. is a tool safe, effective and acceptable?), as well as the people driven processes around development and implementation (e.g. who needs to be involved, how do they feel about the innovation, what do they need to alter in response, and what are the risks and assumptions which underpin an approach?).
At Matter of Focus, we believe it’s vital that people pursuing digital innovation in health and care settings carefully and clearly tell the story of the difference they would like to make to the people and communities they hope to help.
Implementation is challenging in any area of health and social care, particularly when data and digital approaches are involved. To realise good outcomes for people and for systems, it’s important to understand the change processes and the different players that need to be involved at each stage.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve been working increasingly with people seeking to change health and care services through digital approaches – helping them to describe the difference they want to make, and bring in data and feedback so they can understand whether it is working well and bringing the benefits they hope.
Our approach to clarifying and evaluating digital approaches, informed by our work evaluating the impact of our own software OutNav, is suited to these kinds of relational (i.e. about people) digital services and projects, where simple measures of engaging with the technology or task success are not enough to understand the impact of the work.
We have put our learning into practice in a range of key digital developments:
We have been working with DHI as they take an embedded, outcome focused approach to evaluate three aspects of their work:
We supported this four-year programme, funded by Scottish Government’s Technology Enabled Care (TEC) Programme, Digital Health and Care Directorate (2019-2023). It aimed to help local partnerships to contribute to the transformation of local health and social care systems using digital technologies, shifting local delivery towards prevention and self-management. The Programme was delivered with four local pathfinders:
As a learning partner, we provided the Pathfinders and National team with developmental evaluation support over three years since 2020.
This resulted in a simple but robust framework to evaluate the effectiveness, sustainability and impact of digital health interventions.
Our work with Health Technology Wales has helped them map and track their strategic, national approach to the identification, appraisal and adoption of new health technologies into health and care settings across NHS Wales.
In 2021, Health Technology Wales won the David Hailey Award for Best Impact Story for its approach to evaluating the impact of research into a treatment for multiple sclerosis. You can read a case study about our work with Health Technology Wales here.
We supported the Innovative Healthcare Delivery Programme (IHDP) that seeks to fundamentally change the way data and analytics are used to drive improvement in health outcomes, by fostering new relationships between the NHS, industry, academia, and the third sector. They are using OutNav to set out and track progress of their key programmes.
In November 2022, we attended Digital Health and Care Fest in Glasgow to share our work developing an evaluation framework for digital interventions.
If you would like to learn more about our work in this area, you can view our ePoster showcase on the Digital Health and Care Fest 2022 website.
If you are planning a digital project and would like a chat about how we can help you describe and evaluate the change you seek, please get in touch.
Quick links
Health & Social Care
Third Sector Organisations, NGOs, Community Interest
Research Impact & Evidence to Action
Cross-Sector Partnerships
We worked with Age Scotland to support the evaluation of their pioneering work with people with dementia. This includes evaluation of the About Dementia programme, that is working with people living with dementia and unpaid carers to influence policy and practice, and the Dementia Training Programme.
Read more about our work with Age Scotland Dementia Training Project.
Clackmannanshire and Stirling Health and Social Care Partnership used OutNav to evaluate the implementation of Neighbourhood Care in Stirling. The team started working with Matter of Focus to map their outcomes in 2018 and continued to report on their outcomes with OutNav.
We worked with East Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership Thinking Differently team to track the progress of their work using OutNav. The Thinking Differently team supports overall improvement of practice, systems and processes for the health and social care partnership. In particular, they have pioneered the use of a Peer Mentor approach. In 2022 we held an Evaluation Stories webinar with the Thinking Differently Team, which is available to watch here.
We are working with East Lothian HSCP to build expertise and capability in OutNav with a view to the longer term roll-out of the system. Following an outcome mapping process at HSCP strategic level, it was agreed that designated teams within the Partnership test and further develop three maps at a project level. The areas identified for tailored mapping development were:
We worked with East Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership as they implemented peer support approaches within their mental health and addictions service. We worked alongside the partnership and intensively in 2020, supporting the services to continually learn from the peer support test of change and to embed learning more widely.
More information about this work can be found here.
We worked with the Edinburgh & Lothians Health Foundation to develop an outcome map and build a framework to capture the learning from their Green Health Prescribing project. You can read about this project in their Green Health Prescribing Report
We worked with Edinburgh Community Health Forum to develop a robust and sustainable monitoring framework that enables them to learn, improve the tell the story of the difference the work of the forum makes. They are now using OutNav to continually track their progress.
We also rolled out the approach with several of their member organisations to develop a collective approach to evidencing the contribution of community health organisations to reducing health inequalities in Edinburgh.
Edinburgh Long Term Conditions Service provides support to people living at home with a long term condition. We worked with them to map how their service contributes to improving outcomes for people. Three of the teams are using OutNav to learn, improve and monitor progress.
We worked with Health Technology Wales to help them map and track their strategic, national approach to the identification, appraisal and adoption of new health technologies into health and care settings across NHS Wales. They are using OutNav to help understand how their recommendations are put into practice to improve patient outcomes. We have written a case study about this work
Life Sciences Hub Wales is an arms-length body of the Welsh Government that exists to help propel inspiring life science innovations into frontline use in health and social care in Wales. They work as a dynamic interface that supports industry, health and social care organisations and academic institutions with the common goal of using new ideas to manage, avert and prevent poor health.
They are using OutNav to help them understand the impact and value of the activities they deliver, and to develop organisational objectives and recommendations for their work.
Since autumn 2020 we have been working closely with Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership to help them tell the story of the difference they make to the people of Midlothian. This work has been over two phases, with the first focusing on mapping and evaluating work in relation to strategic commissioning, frailty work and the Number 11 service.
In phase two we are working with new service areas, including unpaid carers and learning disability and autism, to explore their work in a way which is consistent with a strategic level outcome map for the Partnership. Working in this way is highly innovative but challenging, and our shared learning on how best to use OutNav at partnership level has been considerable.
As part of the national Detect Cancer Early Programme the NHS Lothian team is looking at how to reduce inequalities in cancer detection for people with learning disabilities and women from ethnic minority groups. We worked with the NHS Lothian Detect Cancer Early team to track their progress towards these outcomes.
We worked with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to help them evaluate the introduction of new Peer Support Workers roles into five Community Mental Health Teams within Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership. We used a variety of sources of evidence to explore the role and its impact and supported the collaborative development of a robust outcome map for future self-evaluation.
NHS Lothian House of Care is focused on working across the health and social care system to encourage and enable more person centred and preventative approaches. We worked with them to map the contribution of different people in the system to achieving this. They used OutNav to evaluate the specific work they’re doing with GP practices and across the health and social care system.
We worked with Lothian Minority Ethnic Health Inclusion Service to develop an outcome focused evaluation framework that they can use within OutNav to tell a robust story about the contribution of their work to reducing health inequalities for people from BME communities, asylum seekers and refugees.
We are working with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to help them evaluate the introduction of new Peer Support Workers roles into five Community Mental Health Teams within Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership. We will use a variety of sources of evidence to explore the role and its impact and support the collaborative development of a robust outcome map for future self-evaluation.
Obesity Action Scotland provide clinical leadership and independent advocacy on preventing and reducing overweight and obesity in Scotland. We supported them to create an outcome framework and evaluation tools to track the contribution of their work.
Working with personal assistants, personal assistant employers and other stakeholders, we co-produced a blue print for a workforce where personal assistants are valued, have access to training and get parity. The Personal Assistant outcome map is a product of this work, available on the SSSC website.
Building on this, we worked with the Programme Board for Personal Assistants and other people with an interest in the provision of Personal Assistants within social care to develop a high level outcome map to inform the development and evaluation of the future work activities of the Programme Board.
The Scotland Reducing Gambling Harm project, run by the ALLIANCE, is a three year programme to ensure strategic responses are informed by the voice of people who have lived experience of gambling harms. We were the evaluation partner for this work, working alongside the team to ensure that robust evaluation was built in from the start and to support continued learning and improvement. Our year three evaluation report is available on the ALLIANCE website.
We’re working with Social Care Wales to develop an impact assessment and evaluation plan for three selected improvement and development projects and to build the capacity of staff to undertake and embed impact assessment in routine project planning and delivery.
We worked with Edinburgh Community Health Forum to develop a robust and sustainable monitoring framework that enables them to learn, improve the tell the story of the difference the work of the forum makes. They are now using OutNav to continually track their progress.
We also rolled out the approach with several of their member organisations to develop a collective approach to evidencing the contribution of community health organisations to reducing health inequalities in Edinburgh.
Engender is Scotland’s feminist policy and advocacy organisation. We are working with them to map and develop a strategic overview of how their diverse projects and activity streams influence policy and make a difference to the realisation of women’s rights.
Fife Voluntary Action is the Third Sector Interface for Fife. We are the evaluation partners for a new project called ‘From Struggle to Strength’ which will support people with lived experience of poverty or trauma because of poor mental health and/or unemployment to grow the voice of experience in both shaping and delivering services in Fife. The work will be developed through supported volunteering in co-design of policy and services as well as increasing capacity for mental health peer support across Fife. Our four phase evaluation will be completed over two years (2022-23).
Future Pathways offers help and support to people who were abused or neglected as children while they were living in care in Scotland.
We have been working with Future Pathways as a learning partner since early 2018. We worked with them to map their contribution to outcomes and use OutNav to track their progress. We also carried out a scoping study, engaging with their registrants and staff to understand how well the service is working, what can be improved as well as the difference they make.
Future Pathways continue to work with us and use OutNav to underpin their embedded evaluation processes. More about this work is covered in our Evaluation Stories webinar – A new approach to trauma-informed working.
See also Future Pathways’ latest impact report, produced in collaboartion with us.
We were commissioned by the University of Edinburgh and the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children to work with the pathfinder city of Valenzuela in the Philippines to set up a monitoring, evaluating and learning infrastructure as they embarked on their journey as the first city in the world to take a pledge to end violence against children.
We have written a case study about this work
Includem is a youth support charity that works with young people to help them transform their lives. To strengthen their understanding of how their work contributes to improving outcomes for young people, we worked with Includem to map their activities to outcomes. We then worked on a data audit to streamline how they get feedback on progress, so that they can continually learn and improve as well as tell a robust story of the difference they make.
We carried out an independent evaluation of the impact of the Life Changes Advisory Group (Young People with Care Experience Programme), co-commissioned by the Trust alongside the young Advisors.
More information including our evaluation report and related webinar is available.
Penumbra is a pioneering mental health charity providing services and support to people across Scotland. They champion the power of lived experience in helping people create meaningful change in their lives.
Our work with Penumbra involves working closely with four impact and evaluation leads, taking a strategic organisational approach to internal evaluation. We developed a core outcome map with input from people in receipt of services and practitioners which is being successfully applied in a range of service types and projects with the Impact and Evaluation Leads being coached and mentored in their approach by Matter of Focus.
We have written a case study about this work.
The Scottish Beacon Network is a newly formed collaborative of community-based journalists and publications. Through sharing resources and skills and identifying collaborative investigations, their aim is to strengthen the independent community-based media sector and re-invigorate local public interest news by bring stories from Scotland’s communities to a wider audience.
The project has been supported with funding from the Google News Initiative’s Innovation Challenge Fund. We’ve worked with Scottish Beacon to develop an evaluation framework within OutNav to enable them to understand and track the difference they make for the participating publications and the independent news sector as well as on audiences
Scottish Women’s Aid is the lead organisation in Scotland working towards the prevention of domestic abuse. In 2020/21 they piloted a webchat service providing direct support to children and young people experiencing domestic abuse, involving children and young people in service design.
As the evaluation partner for this work, we helped Scottish Women’s Aid to map their outcomes and guided them on gathering data, reflections and learning against their outcome map.
Scotland’s National Arts & Early Years organisation, Starcatchers used OutNav to track progress of their Creative Kin programme for kinship carers and children. They have an ambition to spread this learning and use the approach across all of their programmes and projects to understand and demonstrate the difference they make to the lives of young children age 0-5 and the adults who care for them.
Our work with the Thistle Foundation has helped them to map how the work of the whole organisation contributes to improving outcomes for the people and communities they work. They are using OutNav to help them systematically evidence key aspects of their work including training and funded projects.
In 2020 we held a webinar with the Lothian House of Care collaboration between Thistle Foundation and NHS Lothian available to watch here.
We conducted an impact study of the Global Kids Online research programme for the London School of Economics and UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti. Assisted by Alexandra Ipince from UNICEF Innocenti, we collated existing evidence and feedback and interviewed key stakeholders to capture information on the impacts of the project over the last three years.
We have written a case study about this work.
ARC North West Coast is a research collaborative to improve outcomes for patients and the public through collaboration, working by bringing together academics, health and social care providers, members of the public, universities and local authorities. We are supporting them to articulate and track the impact of this work.
CanChild is an academic network based within the School of Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. CanChild focus their research efforts on children and youth with disabilities and their families, and they strive to innovate and share knowledge and research in an accessible way for families and service providers.
We are working with the CanChild Knowledge Translation (KT) group in four areas of their work to help researchers and project teams to understand, evidence and showcase the impact of their work.
We worked with the Data-Driven Innovation Health & Social Care Hub at the University of Edinburgh to undertake a data systems analysis and review of current pathways related to the concept of ‘frailty’ in each of the six Health and Social Care Partnerships in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland (ESES) region. The identification and management of ‘frailty’ has been identified as an initial regional priority by the Health and Social Care element of the DDI Programme (HSC DDI) and its partners. We engaged a variety of stakeholders from across the region to explore practitioner perspectives, opportunities and barriers for frailty data.
The DEEP programme is based in Swansea University. By building bridges between policy, research, practice and people, DEEP applies diverse research in policy and practice development to organisations and systems in social work and social care.
We worked with DEEP to help build an outcome focused framework that they can use to evaluate their progress towards intended outcomes for people providing and using social care services in Wales.
We worked with the University of East Anglia to support their involvement with the Compassionate Communties Project. They use OutNav to track the impact of this community project to open up conversations about end of life.
We have created an evaluation framework and supporting data collection for this Global Challenges Research Fund project across the Universities of Edinburgh (led by Prof. Kay Tisdall), Cape Town, Rio de Janeirio, Bethlehem, and Swaziland. The project investigates participation for very young children in fragile environments. It will engage relevant stakeholders and share learning.
Our work will help create one or more outcome maps to ensure the project is impactful and that data is collected consistently to demonstrate its contribution to change.
We worked with Edinburgh Napier University and some community artists to help understand the impact of the Seven Kingdoms project in Wester Hailes. They used OutNav to think how they would work with the local community during the lockdown and to document how they engaged with local people to communicate what mattered to them about their neighbourhood to City planners.
East Ayrshire has long been recognised as pioneering in their work to implement the self directed support policy agenda. Following our work with East Ayrshire HSCP’s Thinking Differently team, we are working on a project to support them to address data and practice gaps, particularly around recording outcomes. This is part of their need to refresh their approach, in light of many contextual challenges.
The project is being delivered in partnership with Dr Emma Miller, an associate researcher at the University of Strathclyde, co-author of Talking Points with Ailsa Cook, and an independent consultant specialising in supporting health and care organisations implement personal outcome approaches and SDS, linking practice and strategy.
Matter of Focus is leading on outcome mapping and OutNav. Emma Miller is supporting a cycle of practice improvement to address data and practice gaps, particularly around recording outcomes.
ImROC is a global mental health development organisation. We are leading an external evaluation of their Peer Support Training Programme. The evaluation takes place over four phases over one year from October 2022. We will collaboratively develop an agreed theory of change for the how the training supports trainees to thrive and have a data plan which includes gathering new data through interviews and surveys and also analysis of data collected routinely during training.
Launched in New Delhi in November 2014, the Know Violence in Childhood Global Learning Initiative was established by multilateral institutions, non-governmental organisations and funding agencies concerned about the global impact of violence in childhood and the lack of investment in effective violence prevention strategies.
We worked with Know Violence on an evaluation of the outcomes they achieved, and to develop a framework for embedding and extending outcomes through the work of the Global Partnership to end Violence Against Children.
Since Scotland became the first devolved country in the world to choose to incorporate the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) into law in March 2021, many organisations have been considering and preparing the ground for the changes that this will bring.
To contribute to cohesion and readiness for these changes, we worked with the Observatory of Children’s Human Rights Scotland and Public Health Scotland to develop a Theory of Change for implementation, supported by the Scottish Government. The project involved a range of people invested in this work, including children and young people themselves, to collectively articulate how and why they think change will happen, creating a framework against which we can track progress towards outcomes.
For more about this work, visit the Observatory of Children’s Human Rights Scotland’s website
Technology Enabled Care (TEC) is defined as “where outcomes for individuals in home or community settings are improved through the application of technology as an integral part of quality, cost effective care and support”.
The Transforming Local Systems Pathfinder Programme is supporting four partnership areas to redesign services with a focus on better use of technology. In the process the team have piloted several pioneering approaches to programme management, service delivery and service design.
We supported the programme team to take a developmental approach to the evaluation of this work at three different levels to understand: