Organisations working across regions, partners, or whole systems face tough evaluation questions:
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How do we measure impact across multiple services and strands of work?
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How do we use qualitative and quantitative data in ways that are meaningful?
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How do we track long-term or less visible outcomes—like policy influence or community-level change?
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What methods or tools work when multiple theories of change are in play?
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And how do we do all of this collaboratively, across sectors and contexts?
Evaluating complex, large-scale change is inherently challenging.
Traditional methods can feel like a poor fit – reducing change to a few performance indicators that miss the bigger picture, or imposing rigid, top-down or expensive models that may or may-not support learning or adaptation.
At Matter of Focus, we offer an alternative: a participatory and adaptive approach that can be embedded into day-to-day work. One that means using existing data and evidence, and supplementing it with meaningful assessment to understand, track and improve the difference you make at scale.
Our approach works for collaborations, funders, networks and delivery partners tackling complex issues–together.
We bring clarity and focus
Through our consultancy support and software, OutNav, we support teams to collaborate well to: help organisations embed a practical and meaningful approach to:
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Build shared understanding of large scale change processes and outcomes
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Understand the wider factors that influence the same change
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Create robust, tailored evaluation frameworks
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Make sense of data, feedback and information in real time
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Track progress across projects, geographies and organisations
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Report meaningfully on the difference they’re making.
It starts with a theory of change…
We can support your team to build pragmatic theories of change using simple headings that reflect our contribution analysis approach.
Learn more about our approach to understanding and evaluating at scale in our webinar
Case study
Discover how we helped three different programmes approach evaluation at scale, each using a different a different model.
Some of the support services we offer…
Outputs from this work can include shareable maps, reports, visuals and evidence plans.
Context mapping
We help you examine and create a shared understanding of the wider factors outside your control that influence the same change and are likely to help and hinder your work.
Such contextual factors include relational and individual components as well as material and societal drivers, including norms and predominant values.
Taking time to think and talk about context will help you:
- identify key risks to your initiative or work
- think through how risks can be mitigated and build on opportunities to improve or strengthen your initiative
- establish reasonable expectations about what an initiative might achieve given the time and resources available and contextual opportunities and limitations.
To help you understand the context of your work, we use an adapted version of the evidence-based “ISM Framework” created by the Scottish Government.
‘Success story’ sessions
We support your team and stakeholders to share ways they have intervened in the system that seem to work – this can help to build up an understanding of the main change mechanisms that look promising for the work and forms the basis of the outcome mapping stage.
Outcome mapping sessions
Outcome mapping is fully a participatory process to understand and build a theory of change, linking activities to the change that you seek.
These sessions can include a wide range of stakeholders who can bring a perspective on the system and the change needed, or we can coordinate a round of consultation to ensure important perspectives are included.
The resulting outcome maps form the basis for assessment plans.
Assessment plans
Working together, we think about how change will be monitored and what combination of reflection, feedback and data is needed to understand change in order to learn, improve and keep the programme on track.
… and our software that holds it all together and embeds evaluation at scale
OutNav is our secure, cloud-based software that provides a single place to hold your outcome maps and assessment plans, bringing together data and evidence for ongoing learning, monitoring and improvement, with clear and professional reporting functions.
Projects can be linked and insights aggregated to give you an overall picture of progress.
Organisations using OutNav to understand and evaluate change at scale:
Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership
Since 2020 we have been working closely with Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) to help them tell the story of the difference they make to the people of Midlothian.
This work has involved several phases and started by developing one outcome map that all services delivered by the HSCP could use to track the impact of their work using OutNav. This outcome map was further developed through several rounds of piloting to provide one place where all services could not only track the difference their work makes to people, but also provide assurance that the service is meeting statutory requirements and has robust quality management processes in place.
The HSCP has extended use of OutNav to Board reporting and has developed and implemented an outcome map that provides assurance to the Integrated Joint Board that there is good governance in place and that the HSCP is making progress towards delivering on strategic aims and national health and wellbeing outcomes. This work has been recognised by Audit Scotland as an example of good practice in IJB Governance and reporting.
The Partnership continues to develop the approach and is using OutNav’s Linked Projects Explorer feature–introduced in 2025–to ensure that insights captured from service level can be robustly aggregated and used to inform IJB reporting.
Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership – Unpaid Carers
Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) is taking an innovative approach to outcomes focused commissioning for organisations delivering support to unpaid carers in Edinburgh.
Long-term contracts agreed with organisations are led by what matters to carers, as set out in the Carers Strategy.
We are supporting the HSCP and funded organisations to track their progress towards these outcomes using a shared evaluation framework that will integrate their agreed KPIs along with diverse and rich data about the difference they make and what they are learning from their work with unpaid carers. Catch up with our Evaluation Stories webinar with the unpaid carers team.
