Ripple Effect Mapping is a hugely useful and flexible evaluation tool for those working in communities and change-making, dealing with trying to make change on social issues where benefits aren’t always immediate, obvious or tangible. As part of our recent work with Bristol City Council on the evaluation of their Community Resilience Fund, People’s Voice Media led four Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with people representing community organisations that had received grant funding for capital projects. In this blog, Lauren Wallace-Thompson, our Communications and Community Engagement Manager, gives our top 5 reasons that we love to employ this tool to support partners, communities and clients with evaluation and learning.

Does it seem a little OTT to have a favourite evaluation tool? I’ve been a researcher for over 15 years now, and to be honest, the word “methodologies” still kind of brings me out in a cold sweat. At People’s Voice Media, we spend a lot of time bigging up the importance of “qualitative” data (that is, data other than pure numbers – which could be words, feelings, pictures, videos). We collect lots of stories from individuals via our Community Reporting method, and use these to create datasets of people’s experiences in their own words. Sometimes however, we want to “zoom out” slightly, and look at the bigger picture. Where we are trying to create change in a community, a system, an organisation or on a social issue, we need a way to capture all the various ways in which an intervention has an impact.

Enter, stage right, waving a flipchart marker pen: Ripple Effect Mapping. It’s a people-powered, flexible tool for discovering what has changed. It has lots of great features, and you can find out a bit more about how the process works on our previous blog. It involves getting people together in a room with a giant sheet of paper and some marker pens, and really thinking through all the changes that have happened. In the case of the Bristol City Council work, the “intervention” was funding for capital improvements awarded to 56 community organisations or projects. But it could be anything – the results of a campaign, a change in policy, a training programme, a social action, a charitable act.

Here are 6 things that we love about using Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation:

1. It’s collaborative

Ripple Effect Mapping is always most powerful when undertaken in groups to make the most of the “hive mind”, and to gather perspectives from different parts of an organisation. You can bring in views and ideas from senior management, volunteers, beneficiaries, trustees, project coordinators, local residents and more. Different people will have experienced the changes in different ways, and observed things others haven’t. It really makes the most of collective knowledge.

2. It gives over power to the people who understand best

Ripple Effect Mapping hands over the identification of impact to the people with the real expertise. Can an external evaluator judge exactly what changes have occurred? Can they notice subtle and unintended consequences (especially that go beyond those stated on the initial project brief, for example)? Well, maybe. But probably not as much as someone who has been embedded in the organisation, or lives in the community, and has witnessed the change first-hand.

3. It’s flexible

Sometimes evaluation markers can be set from the outset of a project – and they remain fixed. Which means that other things that change might be overlooked.

Ripple Effect Mapping starts with a blank sheet of paper, which means there’s no parameters on what can be recorded and tracked.

For this reason, we always say that it’s good for tracking:

• both postive and negative outcomes
• expected and unexpected consequences
• intentional and unintended results
• direct impacts, and others that are more tangential
• changes that have already occurred, and things that are now in progress for the future

4. It’s genuinely joyful

Of all the different sessions I deliver when facilitating with People’s Voice Media, it’s Ripple Effect Mapping sessions that I look forward to the most. For lots of organisations or community groups, it’s the first time they’ve ever stepped back and put down all their achievements and successes down on paper, and they are often both surprised and proud (rightly so!) at the impact of their work. We do always make sure as facilitators that the group spends some time considering any downsides, challenges or misfires that have occurred, but overwhelmingly these sessions are full of positivity and celebration.

5. It tells a story

A key part of our Ripple Effect Mapping sessions is where we ask participants to talk us through their maps. This really gives people the chance to process all that they’ve discovered into a narrative that shows a journey of change, improvement and learning. This in itself can be a really powerful moment for a community or organisation, where they recognise their own capacity to create change. And you know how fond of a story we are here at People’s Voice Media!

6. It can be longitudinal

Or perhaps we should make that, it should be longitudinal. With many projects, interventions or changes, it can take a long time to see the full picture of the real world impacts that are created. The old “Rome wasn’t built in a day” cliche holds especially true when you’re dealing with complex social issues or within rigid systems where change can be slow.

Ripple Effect Mapping is really useful for tracking change over time, and supporting continuous learning and improvement. We often recommend that groups repeat the Ripple Effect Mapping process at intervals both during and after a project (say every six or 12 months), or after key milestones are achieved. A snapshot immediately after a project finishes might not give enough time for the impact “ripples” to have worked through and spread out, so try doing a Ripple Effect Map again 6 months down the line, and compare the two to get a fuller picture of those longer-term impacts and changes.

“This approach to evaluation was an exciting venture for us. It has allowed us to be creative and highlight the real life impacts of our work – we often get stuck behind figures, so it’s been fantastic to bring the fund’s impacts to life. We’re already, as a team, using the REM tool in other areas of work, so this project has given us all some professional skills!” – Bristol City Council Community Development Team

And one thing we don’t love so much…

It’s messy. Oh, it’s messy. Getting the sprawling thoughts of a group of people down on paper in a limited amount of time can mean that some of those maps look like a toddler has been let loose with the felt tips. That’s okay, though – it’s all part of the process and we’re here to help hold you in the chaos. That’s why it is really helpful to have someone external to come in and facilitate the process, adding in some structure and ensuring there is time for interpretation and explanation, and then working to extract and analyse the data from the maps into useful learning and action.

If you would like People’s Voice Media to design and facilitate a Ripple Effect Mapping process to support your organisation with its learning and evaluation, please get in touch. Just email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk or leave us a comment below!

We’re big fans of projects that really showcase the versatility of Community Reporting, and those that put communities and people at the heart of local decision-making in truly meaningful ways. So, you could say that working as evaluation partners on Bristol City Council’s Community Resilience Fund was a dream collaboration for People’s Voice Media. Read on to find out more about this people-powered project that put funds into the hands of grassroots local organisations, and how we used lived experience methodologies to assess its impacts.

Bristol City Council’s (BCC) Community Resilience Fund was a £4m grant fund designed to support community organisations with capital works, especially those that challenged power imbalances in the most deprived communities by improving accessibility, sustainability or offering other future-proofing benefits. The council worked very hard to ensure that people from the local community had a say in where the funding went, how it was allocated and how it was spent. This included having a panel of 100 community experts acting as “resident decision-makers”, supported by local councillors and experts in sustainability, accessibility and capital works. Community and voluntary groups seeking funding were guided through the grant-making process by the BCC Communities Team and by capacity-building organisations WECIL (West of England Centre For Inclusive Living), BSWN (Black South West Network) and Voscur, to ensure greater equity in the application process. But BCC also wanted to make sure that the evaluation of the funding followed the same process and centred community power and participation. That’s where People’s Voice Media came in!

Community Reporting for evaluation

From the panel of community decision makers, seven people were recruited and trained as Community Reporters. The training from People’s Voice Media gave them the skills to conduct video and audio interviews with the grantee organisations, using open questions to explore the on-the-ground experience of applying for the grant, how the money has been used, and what impact it has had on beneficiaries, staff and the local community. We also conducted sense-making sessions with the Community Reporters to help understand what the key themes were emerging from the stories gathered, which then informed the findings in the evaluation report. You can watch our short Impact Snapshot film for some of the highlights from the 23 stories gathered or find all the video and audio interviews here. Some of the headline findings from the Community Reporting phase of the evaluation process were:

• The CRF grant allowed community groups and organisations to meet diverse community needs
• The improvements funded by the CRF broadened and deepened the organisations’ reach within the community
• Organisations achieved greater financial resilience through cost reduction
• The CRF allocations supported strategic planning and futureproofing
• The CRF process was a positive, trust-based funding experience

Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation

We also wanted to give the grantee organisations space to explore themselves what the impact of receiving the funding had been so far. People’s Voice Media facilitated Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with representatives from 20 of the community groups that received the funding, where they could explore the impact that the works funded from the grant has had on their organisations, individuals and society. (More about Ripple Effect Mapping coming up in a future blog!) A thematic analysis of the maps was then carried out, which identified the following key areas of change across the participating community organisations:

• Accessibility and inclusion
• Skills development and employment creation
• Income generation
• Environmental sustainability
• Support for mental health and wellbeing
• Improvement of community offerings

Evaluation findings

From all this detailed qualitative research, we were able to produce an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the Community Resilience Fund, and also a set of detailed learnings and specific recommendations useful to Bristol City Council and other local authorities or grant-makers looking to support community capital works projects in the future. 

You can read about these in more detail in the Executive Summary or download the Full Report.

If you are interested in finding out more about how People’s Voice Media can support your organisation or local authority to undertake evaluation in a way that prioritises the voice of communities, please get in touch. You can contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.