Impact
At PDP we are always seeking new knowledge, learning and growing. Our programmes are informed by a range of well-documented theories such as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), as well as the 4 Level Relationship Theory, developed by Paul Oginsky, our Founder.
We want our programmes to bring about growth and have an impact, and we are always looking for ways to further develop content, delivery methods, tools and evaluation. Each of our programme areas has its own Theory of Change that specifies ‘personal growth opportunities’ (our term for ‘possible outcomes’).
From these Theories of Change we have developed the PDP Evaluation Toolkit to capture and analyse the participant’s learning, which in turn informs our learning.
PDP Evaluation Toolkit
Reactions:
The initial response
In this area we monitor how people respond to our training. We do this through observation during the session, verbal feedback during the session and course surveys. We look at things like how engaged participants were and how they reacted to different parts of the programme. It helps us to identify unmet training needs, how we might make improvements to our training style and delivery, and sometimes can help us to look at barriers to learning and how we can help address these.
Realisations:
lightbulb moments
Our programmes are designed to bring about realisations from participants – which in turn we hope will inspire change and growth. To build a complete picture of the impact of our work, we capture as many of these realisations as we can and look at themes arising from each programme. Sometimes we call these ‘lightbulb moments’ or ‘sparks’. They can very often be turning points, moments of clarity and connecting the dots, that enable and inspire a participant or a team to move forward and make progress. The realisation themes tell us how our programmes work and how we might make connections between realisations and longer term personal change and growth. We capture these realisations through observation, verbal feedback during the session, surveys, one-to-one follow-up discussions and focus groups.
Insights:
Stories of personal growth
We are excited to be launching our Insights evaluation project.
Here we will go deeper into stories of change and personal growth. Our storytelling methodology is informed by the Most Significant Change approach that looks at impact without any pre-defined indicators. The storyteller decides what was the most significant impact for them and it comes from their own lived experience over a period of months, or even years. This will give us an understanding of the very diverse and personalised outcomes that participants experience, told in their own words. conversational style
We have an appreciation of the myriad of experiences in a participant’s life that work together to create personal growth and change and we recognise the challenge in attributing specific and measurable outcomes to our programmes alone. We prefer to outline the personal growth opportunities for each programme and then capture participant feedback to find out what actually happened. We are always delighted to find growth in areas we didn’t think about - and this helps us to continuously improve our work.
We select a mix of methods from our three part toolkit depending on the content of the course, length of the course (from 1 hour online to 18 hours face to face), method of delivery (online, face to face, blended) and the target group. One of our aims with the toolkit is that each method is of benefit to the participant, and a part of their growth opportunities. It gets them thinking about impact as well as allowing us to learn from them. We want our evaluation to be part of the transformation process.
A PDP team member may contact you and ask you to reflect on your experience with questions through an interview, survey, focus group or other methods. Or, if you would like to share your story or realisation, contact us at kylie@pdpuk.com, and we will be in touch. We’d love to hear from you, no matter how much time has passed!