Short Abstract

All evaluations require good governance and adaptation, but these take on new meanings and importance in long-term evaluations of new interventions. In this session, the commissioner and evaluator reflect on how to build effective evaluation cultures in lengthy and novel evaluations.

Description

Commissioning Better Outcomes was funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It operated from 2013 to 2024, with a mission to support the development of more social outcomes contracts in England. It made up to £40m available to pay for a proportion of outcomes payments for social outcome contracts (SOCs, previously known as social impact bonds (SIBs) commissioned locally (i.e. by local authorities, clinical commissioning groups, police and crime commissioners etc; hereafter referred to as ‘commissioners’). Alongside the CBO programme, The National Lottery Community Fund commissioned Ecorys and ATQ Consultants to evaluate the CBO and to explore the ‘SOC Effect’. Running from 2013-2025, the evaluation aimed to explore the advantages and disadvantages of commissioning via a social outcomes contract; challenges in developing social outcomes contracts and how they can be overcome; and the extent to which CBO met its aim of growing the market for social outcomes contracts.

At the time of commissioning the evaluation, SOCs were a very new mechanism, with limited examples of how they had been evaluated previously. Furthermore, the evaluation was over a very long timescale – 12 years. All evaluations require good governance, strong working relationships and adaptation, but these take on new meanings and importance in an evaluation of such novelty and duration. This session highlights the key learnings of how to develop an effective evaluation culture that stands the test of time, drawing on both the commissioner (The National Lottery Community Fund) and evaluator (Ecorys) perspectives. In particular, it encourages stakeholders to be cognisant of, and embrace, the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing process that takes place in any new team.