Financial wellbeing evaluation toolkit

The evaluation toolkit is a set of resources (including outcomes frameworks) that you can use to plan and carry out your evaluation.

It focuses on measuring changes in people's financial wellbeing, behaviour and capability. It helps you to understand how your activity has led to those changes and use this learning to refine your programme.

The toolkit is based around three steps: planning, doing and sharing your evaluation. We provide guidance, tools and templates to get you started.

The toolkit can be used by any organisation that wants to measure and understand changes in people's financial wellbeing, behaviour or capability. 

It can support a range of professionals, including:

• providers of financial wellbeing programmes, supporting them to plan and evaluate their programmes, and to generate evidence that can be used to refine activity or show its impact to funders
• funders of financial wellbeing programmes, helping to improve programme design and application processes, as well as providing resources that delivery partners, applicants and grant holders can be directed to
• researchers and evaluators, by providing outcomes frameworks and question banks to measure financial wellbeing outcomes.

Before you can evaluate your programme, you need a clear understanding of how it is meant to improve people's financial wellbeing.

A Theory of Change is a simple way to set this out. Our guidance explains what a Theory of Change is, how to develop it and how to use it when choosing outcomes to measure.

You can also view our Theory of Change case study showing an example of how this has been used in a financial wellbeing intervention.

Once you have set out how your programme will work and the outcomes you will measure, the next step is to think about how you will measure these outcomes.

Our guidance helps you with data collection, how you will demonstrate change and impact, and how you can develop a plan for carrying out your evaluation.

The toolkit includes an evaluation plan templateOpens in a new window (DOCX, 94KB).

You can also view our case studies, with examples of collecting quantitative and qualitative data as part of a financial wellbeing evaluation.

The purpose of evaluation is to help you improve your programme and make decisions about the work you do.

Sharing your findings shows the impact of your work and helps others learn from it too, improving policy and practice across the sector. Our guidance will help you to develop a learning and sharing plan at the outset of your evaluation.

Our toolkit includes a template for a learning and sharing planOpens in a new window (DOCX, 94KB).

You can also view our implementing outcomes in evaluation design case study, which shows how this has been used to support a financial wellbeing project.

Our team can help you make the most of the toolkit. Get in touch with us by:

• emailing what.works@maps.org.ukOpens in a new window

We suggest exploring the financial wellbeing evidence hub, as well as our own published research, to help you find insights that can inform your work.

There are many more resources with detailed evaluation guidance available online, and we've included some suggested sources in our toolkit guidance.

We worked with stakeholders and evaluation experts to develop the toolkit. Much of this work has focused on developing the suite of outcomes frameworks and question banks, ensuring they are evidence-based and cover the range of outcomes that organisations will seek to address.