How to write up and communicate the evaluation of your mentoring or befriending project

Focus on the learning and difference your project makes

Your write up should bring together findings on what your project has achieved and what you have learnt. The learning is critical to ensuring you and others use the evaluation to develop and improve your mentoring or befriending project.

To help organise your findings go back to the changes, learning and benefits (the outcomes) you wanted your mentoring or befriending project to have. What findings do you have for each outcome? Bring together your quantitative and qualitative evidence for each, summarising the changes that have or haven’t happened and identify the factors that have helped or hindered. You could, for example, have a different heading for each outcome or group of outcomes. You also need to include findings on the unexpected changes brought about by your mentoring or befriending project, both negative or positive.

There will also be evaluation findings on your services and activities, for example, on how many activities have been provided and how satisfied service users were. Report on what went well with your activities and how things could be improved. 

Be clear about the audience

Think about the best format for your write up and whether you need to present your findings in different ways for different groups of people - for example, project staff may need a report with more detailed findings and learning, whereas your service users may only want headlines on the difference the project has made and recommendations for developing it. You could ask for their views on how you can best communicate the findings from your evaluation - what findings will your audiences find most useful and interesting? 

Think creatively about how to present your findings

If you want to produce a formal report, think about who will be reading it and the best ways to get them interested in the findings – for example, using graphs, tables, images, photographs, word clouds and case studies (see guidance for writing case studies). Use quotes if you have them as this can bring your findings to life. Evaluation Support Scotland has useful guidance on writing an evaluation report.

There are many ways to present your evaluation findings - being creative can help capture the attention of your audience.

• Slide deck of findings
• One or two page summaries
• Verbal presentations, for example at an event or meeting
• Posters
• Bulletins or newsletters
• Press releases
• Web pages
• Blogs
• Videos

Share your findings

Different groups of people might be interested in your evaluation findings – project staff, service users, mentors, befrienders, funders and others.

Make sure you share your findings, particularly with those who have taken the time to be involved with your evaluation. This includes sharing the learning from your evaluation and being honest about what hasn’t gone so well with your project. Invite people to reflect and feedback on the evaluation findings.