What do ping pong balls, sticky dots, jelly babies and interpretive dance have in common? Well, they could all be part of your next evaluation!
When you think about evaluation, what comes to mind?
Surveys? Spreadsheets? Pre- and post-questionnaires? Endless requests for feedback?
What about creativity, playfulness, reflection, storytelling and, dare I say it… FUN?!
At Engagement with Impact, I’m a big believer that evaluation doesn’t have to be boring, burdensome or something we do simply because a funder tells us to. It can be creative, meaningful, participatory and even enjoyable for the people involved. In our latest Evalua-Tea CommuniTea Live, we gathered a wonderful group of evaluators, researchers and engagement professionals to explore what creative evaluation does, could and should look like. Here are some of our key takeaways.
Why get creative with evaluation?
Let’s start with a familiar challenge.
You’ve delivered a fantastic workshop, event or programme. Everyone seems to have had a wonderful time. You’ve created meaningful connections, sparked conversations and perhaps even changed how people think or feel.
And then you announce…
“Before you leave, could you just fill out this evaluation survey?”
Cue the collective sigh!
Survey fatigue is real.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good survey. They can be incredibly useful, efficient and effective. But they aren’t always the most appropriate, engaging or accessible way of understanding people’s experiences. And perhaps more importantly, they don’t always capture the things that matter most.
During our community discussion, we explored several reasons why creative evaluation can be so valuable:
- Increasing engagement: Making evaluation something people actually want to participate in, rather than another task on their to-do list.
- Improving accessibility and inclusivity: Offering different ways for people to express themselves, particularly where written surveys might create barriers.
- Capturing richer insights: Exploring emotions, experiences, stories and unexpected outcomes that might not fit neatly into a tick box.
- Encouraging reflection: Helping participants recognise and make sense of their own learning, development and experiences.
- Building trust and connection: Creating opportunities for openness, conversation and shared understanding.
- Making evaluation enjoyable: Because why shouldn’t evaluation be fun?!
One of my favourite reflections from the session was that evaluation should give something back to the people taking part.
Creative evaluation methods to add to your toolkit
One of the joys of bringing evaluation practitioners together is discovering the wonderful approaches people are already using. Here are some ideas shared during our session, alongside a few practical suggestions for how you might use them.
1. Sticky dots, voting stickers and visual feedback
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most effective. Instead of asking participants to complete a questionnaire, why not create a visual feedback wall?
Participants could place coloured stickers against statements, questions or scales to show how they feel.
For example:
“How confident do you feel about applying what you’ve learned?”
Create a large visual scale from 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (extremely confident), and invite people to place a sticker where they feel they belong.
You could do this at the beginning and end of a session, using different coloured stickers to capture changes.
Why give it a go? It’s quick, visual, interactive and can provide useful quantitative data. You can also invite participants to explain their choices to capture richer qualitative insights.Something to consider: People may be influenced by where others have placed their stickers. Think about whether individual or anonymous responses would be more appropriate.
2. Ping pong balls, voting tokens and other playful approaches
Yes, you read that correctly. Ping pong balls!
I’ve experimented with using ping pong balls as a creative way for participants to vote or share feedback. The idea is simple: provide labelled containers representing different responses, and invite people to place a ball into the container that best reflects their experience.
For example:
“What was the most valuable part of today’s workshop?”
Participants could vote for learning new skills, meeting others, sharing experiences or gaining confidence.
You could use anything from ping pong balls to coloured counters or tokens.
A word of warning, though…
I once tried this in a project, and the ping pong balls ended up everywhere!
Did we collect particularly useful data? Not really.
Did we learn something about designing creative evaluation activities? Absolutely!
And that’s okay.
There is no fail, only learning. Sometimes we need to experiment, reflect and adapt.
3. Reflective journals and creative prompts ✍️
This is one of my personal favourites.
Reflective journals can be incredibly powerful for capturing experiences, learning and change over time. Rather than asking people to complete a traditional feedback form, we can invite them to reflect on their experiences through more open-ended questions.
One lovely approach shared during the session was:
Learn it, Felt it, Love it, Leave it.
- Learn it: What’s something new you learned?
- Felt it: How did the experience make you feel?
- Love it: What did you particularly enjoy or value?
- Leave it: What would you change, improve or leave behind?
Four simple prompts that can capture learning, emotions, positive experiences and opportunities for improvement.
You could invite people to write, draw, discuss or even record their reflections.
And if you revisit these questions over time, you may start to uncover some fascinating longer-term outcomes.
4. Storytelling and collective sense-making
One of the most thought-provoking examples shared during our session came from a community member who had participated in an arts programme. As part of the evaluation, participants were invited to tell their stories about their experiences.
These stories were recorded, transcribed and shared back with participants for review.
But here’s where it got particularly interesting.
The participants then came together to collectively explore the stories, identify emerging themes and reflect on what the programme had meant to them.
Rather than an evaluator independently deciding what mattered, participants were actively involved in making sense of their own experiences and impacts.
I absolutely love this approach.
Not only can it generate rich qualitative evidence, but it can also provide participants with an opportunity to reflect, connect and recognise their own development.
The evaluation becomes part of the learning experience itself.
5. Ripple effect mapping and journey mapping
How often do we focus on the immediate outcomes of a programme, only to miss the wider ripples of change that happen afterwards?
One of the approaches discussed was ripple effect mapping.
This is a participatory approach that helps people explore the wider and sometimes unexpected changes resulting from a project, programme or intervention.
Imagine dropping a pebble into a pond.
The initial splash might represent your activity, but what about all those ripples spreading outwards?
Journey maps and ripple effect mapping offer opportunities to explore these changes visually and collaboratively.
They can be particularly valuable when evaluating complex programmes where impacts emerge over time.
6. Getting creative with the way we use traditional tools
Here’s something that really stuck with me from our discussion.
Creative evaluation doesn’t always mean inventing a completely new method.
Sometimes it’s simply about using existing methods in a more thoughtful or imaginative way.
One participant shared an example of an immersive soundscape experience exploring brain injury.
The evaluation used surveys, but they were creatively embedded into the experience itself, with participants encountering them as part of their journey through a simulated hospital environment. The surveys themselves were fairly traditional, but the way they were incorporated into the experience was anything but!
This got us thinking.
Could we embed evaluation into activities rather than making it something separate?
Could we make our surveys more visually appealing?
Could we use creative questions that encourage people to open up?
One wonderfully playful example shared was asking children:
“What was the smelliest part of your experience? Was it a good smell or a bad smell?”
An unusual question, perhaps, but one that can prompt laughter, conversation and openness.
Of course, we still need to think carefully about what we’re actually trying to understand, but sometimes a little creativity can help people feel more comfortable sharing their experiences.
Can we get TOO creative with evaluation?
Now, this was a particularly interesting question!
And the answer?
Possibly! But perhaps not in the way you might think.
Throughout our discussions, several important challenges emerged.
1. Are we actually collecting useful data?
It’s all very well having 100 people enthusiastically throwing ping pong balls into containers, but what does it actually tell us?
Creative methods need to connect back to our evaluation questions.
Before choosing a method, ask yourself:
What am I trying to understand, and how will this activity help me understand it?
If you’re trying to measure changes in confidence, you might need a consistent scale.
If you’re exploring how participants experienced a programme, storytelling or reflective prompts might be more appropriate.
And if you’re interested in unexpected impacts, perhaps a journey map or open-ended discussion would work best.
Start with your evaluation question, not the shiny new tool!
2. How do we analyse and report our findings?
Another challenge raised was how to translate creative outputs into meaningful evidence.
Funders and senior leaders may want numbers, percentages and clearly defined outcomes.
But what happens when your evaluation produces drawings, stories, photographs or visual maps?
This is where we need to think about how we will capture, analyse and communicate the evidence.
Could we identify themes across stories?
Could we count responses from visual voting activities?
Could we combine creative qualitative evidence with quantitative measures?
One particularly powerful reflection shared during the session was that so-called soft data only appears soft when we haven’t found ways to recognise and communicate its meaning and value.
We shouldn’t automatically dismiss rich, qualitative evidence simply because it doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
3. Are we being inclusive, or accidentally excluding people?
Creative doesn’t automatically mean accessible.
Not everyone enjoys drawing, speaking in groups, writing reflections or participating in playful activities.
And with children, we discussed how stickers and voting activities can sometimes produce rather questionable results!
Perhaps a child chooses their favourite colour rather than the response that reflects their experience.
Or perhaps they simply copy what their friends are doing.
The important thing is to consider the people we’re evaluating with.
What will work for them, in their context?
Offer choices, consider accessibility and avoid assuming that one creative method will work for everyone.
4. What about time and resources?
Let’s face it, evaluation is often something we’re trying to squeeze into already very busy workloads.
Designing, delivering and analysing creative activities can take time.
But creativity doesn’t have to mean creating an elaborate evaluation masterpiece.
Sometimes it can be as simple as changing one question, introducing a visual voting activity or inviting people to reflect together.
Small changes can make a meaningful difference.
💛 My biggest takeaway: It’s not either/or!
One of the strongest messages to emerge from our CommuniTea Live was that we don’t have to choose between creative and traditional evaluation methods.
Why not use both?
We can combine surveys with storytelling, confidence scales with reflective journals, and voting stickers with follow-up conversations.
This is where using a combination of methods can be particularly valuable.
Different approaches can help us understand different aspects of people’s experiences and provide complementary forms of evidence.
And it gives us a little room to experiment.
If our exciting new ping pong ball activity doesn’t quite work as planned, we might still have other evidence to draw upon.
The aim isn’t to make everything creative for the sake of it.
It’s to make our evaluation more meaningful, appropriate, engaging and useful.
For me, that’s what good evaluation is all about.
🌟 A little challenge for you…
Before you rush off to buy 500 ping pong balls, I’d love you to pause and reflect on your own evaluation practice.
What’s one small thing you could do differently?
Perhaps you could:
- Replace one traditional survey question with a reflective prompt.
- Introduce a visual voting activity at your next workshop.
- Invite participants to share stories about changes they’ve experienced.
- Experiment with a journey map to explore longer-term impacts.
- Ask participants to help you make sense of your evaluation findings.
Or perhaps you’ll be the brave soul who takes up our community challenge of incorporating interpretive dance into evaluation! 💃
(And if you do, PLEASE tell me about it!)
Whatever you decide, give yourself permission to experiment.
It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be complicated. And it certainly doesn’t need to involve a huge budget.
Good enough evaluation is better than no evaluation, and sometimes the most interesting learning happens when we try something new.
☕ Join the Evalua-Tea community!
A huge thank you to everyone who joined our CommuniTea Live and so generously shared their experiences, ideas and reflections.
These conversations remind me why I created Evalua-Tea in the first place.
Evaluation can sometimes feel like quite a lonely practice, particularly if you’re the only person responsible for it within your organisation.
But there’s so much knowledge, creativity and experience out there, and we can learn an enormous amount from one another.
Evalua-Tea is our free community for anyone interested in evaluation, whether you’re a seasoned evaluator, a researcher, an engagement professional or someone who’s just beginning to explore the wonderful world of impact and evaluation.
We come together to share ideas, explore challenges, discover tools and support one another in developing our practice.
And, of course, there’s always room for a good cuppa!
🍵 Join our free Evalua-Tea community: https://engagement-with-impact.com/evaluatea-community/
I’d also love to hear from you:
What’s the most creative evaluation method you’ve ever used or experienced?
And perhaps more importantly, did it work?!
Let’s keep the conversation brewing. 💛
