• Full time (32 hours per week) or part time

  • £32,000 – £38,000 per year (FTE) depending on experience

  • Closes 12noon (BST) Monday 30 September, 2024

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About this position

We are recruiting a senior evaluation consultant to join our team. We need someone who has a passion for helping organisations use evidence to drive change, along with strong facilitation and evaluation/research skills and client/project management experience.

We believe that evaluation is best when it is used for learning, improvement, reflection, and storytelling. Our approach builds on theories of change – outcome maps – as tools for planning, organising, and reflecting on data. We want our clients to have the evidence they need to deliver as best they can for people and communities.

We have a highly refined process of working with clients that includes context analysis, strategy support, building outcome maps, identifying and improving data, and reporting. Our approach is based on our extensive experience and builds on contribution analysis. It is brought to life and embedded into organisations through our specialist, cloud-based software OutNav.

We developed OutNav to underpin our approach to outcome monitoring and evaluation. We have spent the last seven years building this platform for clients to manage outcome and impact evaluation – a single place for them to hold outcome maps and for collecting, collating and analysing data.

If you are committed to evaluation and learning, see the benefit and potential of digital technologies to support complex work, and would thrive working in a small, committed team, helping it to grow, please read on.

What will you be doing as a senior evaluation consultant at Matter of Focus?

Your main work will be with and for our clients who are public service organisations across the public and voluntary sectors and research centres that undertake a mix of service delivery, policy or practice influencing, systems change, partnerships, and supporting engagement of people with lived experience.

We are proud to work alongside pioneering organisations taking complexity informed, whole system, preventative and collaborative approaches to addressing some of the biggest challenges in public services.

You will work across multiple clients on projects of different sizes and scales. On a day-to-day basis you will do a combination of the following:

Work with clients

  • Lead and facilitate workshops to support clients to understand and describe their outcomes and impact, the context for their work, or what they need to do to be more outcome-focused, including outcome mapping.

  • Help organisations and initiatives to design a framework for tracking their impact and progress towards outcomes, using our software OutNav.

  • Support clients with qualitative analysis skills and in devising qualitative and simple quantitative data collection methods.

  • Support clients to use OutNav for their mapping, tracking and reporting needs, including working with clients to identify opportunities to make changes to improve their systems and processes.

  • Lead on data collection, analysis and report writing for specific commissioned work.

  • Work with clients to understand how best they can embed OutNav and our approach into their work to meet their evaluation, governance, assurance and performance management requirements and specify a programme of consultancy services

Internal work

  • Capture learning and identify opportunities to improve our systems and processes and software OutNav.

  • Share learning by contributing to our webinar series, website and social media posts and by attending relevant conferences and events.

  • Use software to manage projects, clients and prospects.

  • Contribute to the ongoing operation and strategic development of the company.

Business development and sales

  • Use networks, including LinkedIn, to reach out and meet potential clients to discuss how our approach might work for them.

  • Meet with prospective clients to demonstrate OutNav and explore fit with our approach.

  • Prepare proposals and support prospective clients through our sales pipeline.

  • Negotiate OutNav renewals and packages of ongoing support with current clients.

As a senior evaluation consultant, you will bring our well-developed processes and practices along with your strong client management, facilitation, analytical and evaluation skills to support our work across sectors. This work is highly varied and can be fast paced, with consultants working across up to 10 different projects at any one time – leading some and supporting others. Each project is led by one consultant with support from the team.

At Matter of Focus we work hard to create a supportive team environment. You will benefit from formal and informal support and supervision as well as opportunities to participate in training and professional development. There are opportunities to develop in the role, including progression to principal evaluation consultant.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for someone with the following skills and experience:

  • A postgraduate qualification in social science or equivalent experience, giving a good grounding in the complex issues our clients face.

  • Well-developed social research and evaluation skills, particularly with competence and enthusiasm for the role of qualitative data collection and analysis.

  • The ability to take on board new information quickly and to work effectively with different types of organisations and across policy / practice / research areas.

  • Experience of working with public and/or voluntary sector organisations.

  • Experience of project management and delivering complex work to time and on budget.

  • The ability to communicate well – face to face, online and in writing – to a broad range of stakeholders including senior public servants, managers, academics, practitioners and service users/volunteers.

  • An interest and aptitude in using software and a belief that public service organisations deserve high quality tech solutions to help them deliver better for people and communities.

  • A cheerful disposition and ability to work well in a team (our culture is can-do and collegiate, and everyone needs to be willing to work for the greater good of the team).

We will be particularly impressed if you have:

  • Excellent client management skills.

  • A track record of business development.

  • Experience of communicating your work and ideas to diverse audiences, face to face and online.

  • Experience of leading and managing projects as a consultant.

  • Experience of leading or supporting organisational change.

Salary, hours and benefits

  • The salary range for this post is £32,000 to £38,000 per year (FTE), depending on experience.

  • This post is full-time or part-time.

  • We are currently a team of seven people and our office is in Codebase Edinburgh. We offer flexibility around hybrid, home and office working, but some time in the office is required on a regular basis.

  • Our normal working week is 32 hours, normally worked as a 9-day fortnight or 4.5 day working week.

  • We have a holiday allowance of eight weeks per year (depending on working pattern/FTE) including public holidays.

Application and interview process

If you would like to apply, please send your CV with a covering letter explaining why you are a good fit for this role and our company. As we are open to part time and flexible working arrangements, please let us know your preferred working pattern.

Your covering letter, CV and preferred working pattern should be directed to recruitment@matter-of-focus.com. If you have any questions, you can also send them to us at this address.

Closing date for applications: 12noon (BST) Monday 30 September 2024

Our selection process has up to three stages because we want to ensure there is a great fit between the successful candidate and our work:

  • If we have any questions about your application, we may call you on the phone as part of our shortlisting process.

  • We host virtual interviews with a shortlist of candidates and will ask you to prepare a presentation for this and share some recent examples of your writing.

  • We meet face to face with the final one or two candidates for a chat.

Anticipated dates:

Shortlisting: week beginning 30 September 2024
Interview (virtual): Monday 7 October 2024
Follow up meeting (in-person): Thursday 10 October 2024