Foundations for Impact: Beginning Our Evaluation With Collaboration and Clarity

Uncategorized Wednesday 1 April 2026

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Written by Lauren Cox 

An immersive evaluation day 

We want to be sure that any outputs from the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership (YPIP) are accessible and engaging to our diverse stakeholder audiences and provide actionable insights and lessons learned for future work. We therefore took the approach for our evaluation to collaborate with an organisation that understood communities and had expert skills and knowledge of behaviour change and impactful communication. We began our relationship with Magpie, an award-winning creative agency, following a tendering process which highlighted their deep understanding of YPIP’s aims and objectives, and their abilities to produce the kinds of outputs we were looking for to translate ideas into impact.

On Monday 23 March, we kicked off the evaluation process with an initial immersive workshop which introduced the Magpie team to 30 colleagues representing different elements of the YPIP project – academic led work packages, community-led demonstrator projects and members of the YPIP Community Panel. The day centred around connecting, sharing and learning and was a rare opportunity for these project partners to come together in-person, which the YPIP core team facilitates twice a year. There was an acknowledgment that we’re currently in an intense period of project delivery, but that there could still be opportunities for midstream course corrections to improve or enhance our work.

Bringing together expertise across research, creativity, and community 

There was a clear emphasis that everyone in the room was an expert in their own right and that all voices should be heard. Magpie’s evaluation approach is underpinned by transparency, humility and curiosity and there was a commitment by everyone in the room to begin this process with mutual respect, using accessible language and having shared accountability.

The purpose of the day was to:

• Reflect on where we are – key learning and experiences across teams and themes
• Consider where we’re headed – identifying the “golden threads” that shape a shared YPIP narrative
• Shape our legacy – capture transferable blueprints and approaches and translate this learning into practical knowledge for future use

The day had a packed agenda which kicked off with an exercise of gathering different perspectives on ‘our why’ for evaluation:

• Reason – who is the evaluation for?
• Reputation – why is this evaluation important?
• Impact – How do we want to be remembered?

This led onto work package teams coming together to think about culture shift mapping to understand what supports and challenges a culture shift within YPIP so that academics, policymakers, and community partners can work effectively alongside each other. This exercise used the COM-B model to understand how capability, motivation and opportunities influence behaviour within the project.

Colleagues were then mixed up to be paired with someone they don’t typical work with to consider questions in relation to one of our evaluation themes:

1. Delivery – what are we learning about how we deliver the work?
2. Community voice – what are we learning about how we engage with communities?
3. Collaboration – What are we learning about working together?
4. Impact – What are we learning about the different our working in making?

The penultimate exercise of the day utilised The Evidence Pie by attendees taking some individual time to use a traffic light ranking system of how different types of evidence are present in the YPIP project. Colleagues were asked to give reasoning for this rating of the six different types of evidence to understand different viewpoints of how YPIP are including diverse ‘data’ and knowledge. This also gave an opportunity for colleagues to review their own practice and consider how to bridge these gaps and bring new perspectives and value to their role.

Magpie will be collating a number of case studies within the final evaluation outputs, and so the session ended with asking colleagues to share a standout piece of work that has defined their time at YPIP and how the lessons they’ve learned through this work could be useful to others.

Inclusive & impact‑focused 

We will be working with Magpie for the remainder of 2026 until YPIP comes to an end. If you’ve been involved in YPIP’s work and would like to contribute to the evaluation process, please get in touch with the team to see how your insights can help shape the YPIP legacy.