Thank you for giving your time as an impact volunteer with Re-engage. You play an important role in helping us understand how the services we provide make a difference in older people’s lives.
What is evaluation?
Evaluation helps Re-engage to understand the impact our programmes are having. The impact team works with colleagues across the organisation to help monitor the success of our programmes, such as call companions and our tea parties. Evaluation helps us to understand how and why the organisation is making a difference. We collect feedback through surveys and interviews, allowing us to use what we learn to improve our programmes and plan new ones.
What does it involve?
We speak to older people and volunteers at regular intervals, as well as for particular projects. Some evaluation activities happen on a weekly, monthly or annual basis, and others happen when needed.
We also make sure surveys are accessible. Around half of those over 75 aren’t online, so we have online and paper versions of our surveys and we call those who aren’t able to complete a survey themselves.
How do we collect information?
For some projects we have set questions and surveys, while for others we write questions and interviews that fit the needs of the project. Sometimes we need to collect information that allows us to look at the bigger picture, and on others we need richer and more detailed information. We like to have a mix of the two where possible.
When we’re looking at our tea party groups, for instance, we will survey older guests by asking them multiple choice questions; this gives us the chance to look at the experiences of the group as a whole.
To get more detail, we also interview some of the older guests, posing more open questions such as: ‘Can you tell me about tea parties?’ We might help with prompts such as ‘What’s the atmosphere like?’ or ‘How would you describe the experience?’
What is impact?
When organisations talk about impact, they usually mean the change(s) that a programme or service creates. Central to our work on impact is collecting information about older people's feelings of loneliness and their sense of well-being. Our mission is to end social isolation and loneliness in older people; evaluating loneliness and well-being helps us to understand how we are achieving that. It helps us know that what we do is working and better understand how a particular service or activity makes a difference.
There is no agreed definition of 'loneliness', but we could say that loneliness is a subjective, painful feeling that occurs when there is a gap or a mismatch between the quantity and quality of our social relationships and what we would like.
By contrast, social isolation is an objective state that only measures the number and/or frequency of social contact.
Well-being is a broader concept, which examines our psychological and physical resources, as well as our social connections. When someone feels lonely, there can be both an emotional and social dimension and people often describe thoughts and feelings of loneliness in terms of anxiety, fear, shame and helplessness. Often someone who is experiencing low well-being is more likely to feel lonely, and vice versa.
How do we measure our impact on loneliness and well-being?
We ask older people a set of questions when they first join one of our services and then at roughly six-month intervals. This method gives us some insight into the extent to which our different programmes are reducing loneliness and improving the lives of older people.
Why do we ask older people directly about their feelings of loneliness and sense of well-being?
Social isolation is fairly objective and easy to assess: a family member or GP might easily see that someone is socially isolated and refer them to our services. However, loneliness and well-being are far more subjective: someone could be socially isolated but perfectly happy, whereas someone else may be surrounded by others but feel immensely lonely. Therefore, the best way to measure whether an individual is feeling lonely, or has low well-being, is by directly asking them questions.
We also know that there is a stigma attached to loneliness and that feelings of shame and failure can compound feelings of loneliness and further lower a person’s well-being. It is therefore important that we can talk openly about feelings of loneliness and encourage others to do so.
What role do impact volunteers play?
Our mission is to help end social isolation and loneliness in older people, and as part of that, one of our objectives is to reach more, and more diverse, older people every year. To do that, we need to ensure we have a firm understanding of older people’s lives and their experiences with us. We want the things we do to be based on evidence, and to contribute to building a better picture of the lives of older people in the UK. The time that you give to us each month is an important part of achieving our goal. The calls you make will:
- ensure that we have up-to-date feedback on our programmes and an accurate picture of how our older people or volunteers are feeling.
- enable us to understand and respond to the needs of our older people and volunteers across our programmes.
- allow us to amplify the voices of older people and involve them in the design and development of our programmes.
- allow us to speak confidently about the impact of our programmes. This in turn helps us to secure future funding for our programmes.