Our evaluation strategy

A culture of learning and evaluation drives our effectiveness, relevance, impact and sustainability.  It also helps increase understanding of the unique contribution volunteering makes to sustainable development.

We strive to embed a culture of learning and evaluation by:

  • building learning and evaluative questions and processes within programmes design and architecture, ensuring they drive programmes and organisational monitoring practices and data collection;
  • increasing the number of collaborative internal evaluative and learning exercises conducted across programmes;
  • using generated findings to facilitate learning, understand the impact and sustainability of our work and drive programme improvement;
  • sharing best practice of rigorous evaluations methodologies, approaches and findings amongst all staff across VSO;
  • increasing the strategic choice of global or meta-evaluations across thematic and geographic areas; and
  • increasing our capacity and confidence to decide on the need and relevance of external evaluation and to commission and manage strong evaluations, using external experts when this is deemed necessary.

Find out more about:

People read a VSO document as part of the One Community, One Family research project in Nepal
Suraj Ratna Shakya

Our research

Our research helps us continuously improve, innovate and shape our development priorities.

Staff at a care facility in Sri Lanka supported by VSO

Our evaluations

Timely evaluation plays a critical role in understanding the contribution we make in delivering sustainable development.