Short Abstract

Discover how the Scottish Funding Council's Evaluation Champions Network empowers staff to embed evaluation culture, build capability, and drive evidence-based action. Gain practical insights, real examples, and lessons for fostering organisational change.

Description

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work” (Peter Drucker). For the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), this captures the challenge at the heart of the UK Evaluation Society's 2026 conference theme, “Bridging the gap: evaluation into action”.

Directly accountable to Scottish Government Ministers and the Scottish Parliament, and with an operating budget of £2bn, the SFC is Scotland’s tertiary education and research authority. With a newly formed three-person Evaluation and Impact team, we cannot “do” all evaluation ourselves. Instead, we are intentionally building an evaluation culture where generating, making sense of and using evidence is everyone’s business.

This presentation shares the early story of SFC’s Evaluation Champions Network – a practical response to that challenge. We have recruited 20 Evaluation Champions from across roles, directorates and professional backgrounds, and partnered with others to design a developmental programme that combines training, peer learning and tailored support anchored in real SFC work. As a key mechanism for implementing SFC’s evaluation strategy, the network aims to increase evaluation capacity, build staff capability and confidence, and create conditions for more timely and robust evidence-based decision making.

The session will outline how the network was conceived and launched: how we secured leadership buy-in; how we recruited and supported champions; and how we framed their role as facilitators and catalysts who bring evaluative thinking into business planning, project management, and reporting. We will describe how a consultancy’s outcome-mapping and theory-informed approach has helped champions connect their day-to-day work to SFC’s strategic objectives, and how this, in turn, is strengthening the alignment between evidence, action and impact.

Drawing on champions’ reflective logs, surveys, interviews, feedback from workshops and examples of champion-led evaluation activities, we will share emerging signs of culture change – and where it is proving harder to shift habits and expectations. In line with Ron Kaufman’s assertion that “organisational culture is everyone’s role and must be seen as the responsibility of everyone in the organisation,” we argue that evaluation cultures are most sustainable when responsibility, skills and enthusiasm for evaluation are distributed across an organisation rather than centralised. This directly speaks to the conference sub-theme of evaluation cultures.

For conference participants, the session will offer: (1) a concrete case study of how a small internal team can use a champions network model to embed an evaluation culture and thereby increase evaluation capacity across an organisation; (2) practical ideas on designing support that genuinely builds evaluation capability rather than simply transferring tools; (3) the chance to hear from one of our Evaluation Champions in person including their experience of the role; and (4) honest reflections on barriers, trade-offs and what we would do differently. Attendees will leave with adaptable principles, questions and prompts to apply in their own organisations as they seek to bridge the gap between evidence and action and embed evaluation as a shared responsibility.

Keywords

Evaluation culture

Evaluation champions

Evaluation capacity and capability

Evidence-based decision making