The Wellcome Trust is a charitable organisation that supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. Within its Corporate Affairs department, a team of 90 people working across communications, brand, and public engagement, there was a growing need for a consistent and effective way to evaluate the impact of their work.
To address this, the Insight Team partnered with CARMA. Together, we set out to deliver a capacity building programme that would empower the team to better measure outcomes, understand their impact, and create a stronger culture of learning.
I’m a Senior Insight Advisor at Wellcome. The Insight team lead the development of strategic and inclusive global insight programs into our priority stakeholders audience. We bring our stakeholder audiences’ perspectives to the organisation to help other teams to advance Wellcome’s priority objectives and grow our brand and reputation.
That could mean commissioning and conducting research that clarifies and builds an understanding of our audiences so that we can better communicate and engage them. We also produce insights into a range of potential engagement approaches so that we can identify the right approach to engage them.
And then lastly, we track and evaluate progress against our impact, to understand if our approach is effective, what works under what context, and whether we're shifting the dial towards our goals. Importantly, we are very keen that through measurement and evaluation we can learn and continue to improve on what we do.
We brought in CARMA at the beginning of 2024 with the purpose to build the skills in the department in evaluating our performance, our outcomes and the impacts of Corporate Affairs activities – they span across communications, brand, public initiatives, and cultural and creative advocacy.
This capacity building is part of an overall impact and evaluation program that the Insight team is leading on, which involves the development of a corporate affairs impact framework and capacity building, followed by a phase of embedding and activating this work.
Within this capacity building work, CARMA delivered and designed a training program.
They also provide coaching, both one-on-one and small team coaching to help apply the training concepts in in real projects and implementation consultation focusing on how we can finesse the impact framework and roll that out.
CARMA has helped us understand how we can better demonstrate our impact to internally and external stakeholders.
They helped us build the confidence that we can be more consistent in our MEL approaches and practices across diverse teams within the department.
And then I think very importantly, to help us to be more audience centric rather than channel centric.
I think in the past years the habit was still very much focusing on activities and single channels rather than focusing on cross-channel measurement.
When we were scoping out this program, we tried to understand the barriers of implementing measurement and evaluation in the department. The top barrier was the lack of time in planning and running evaluation. It's also related to timeliness, when is a good time to start running an evaluation, when can we capture timely data to inform our ongoing decision management improvements.
Setting clear communication objectives can be a challenge, as well as identifying the metrics that can help demonstrate our contribution to strategic goals given these are long term goals.
In the training CARMA gave us some useful tools to help objective setting, helped us learn about best practice approach for communications measurement, the different types of metrics we could use versus some other ones that we shouldn't be leaning in on as much.
Those are some of the benefits we got from CARMA so far.
What really stood out for me from CARMA is the expertise in communications and public affairs measurements and evaluation. I know that through working with them, we are not only relying on current best practice, but they will bring in new knowledge to continue to improve the way we do our measurements and evaluation as well.
I also appreciate the strong credentials and expertise they have in supporting and representing in-house corporate affairs teams. They understand what we need to demonstrate, and I feel that they can be a strong advocate and a critical friend with us on this journey.
I had some previous engagement with a few members from CARMA through AMEC but a lot of this understanding came through the pitch, their proposals and the actual interaction with them.
We deliberately built in an immersion phase as they came on board to this work because I'm conscious that Wellcome is a big organisation, and having worked as a consultant before as well, I understand that it can be difficult for an agency just to get in and get started without sufficient context.
In this immersion phase we shared our internal strategy documents with them, and we brought them in for a full day to meet and speak with different people in our team so that they get a sense of what are they interested in, what they think are the needs and gaps.
They understand our challenges and they can articulate it very well and I feel like this is probably because they have experience working with so many clients it is sometimes reassuring for them to say to us, “you're not the only organisation having this challenge”.
First is really considering where your team is at in this journey. We had a long scoping process for this impact and evaluation work to identify what the needs and barriers are across different teams, as they might be in different places in their MEL journeys. Hence, what’s the external expertise that needs to be brought in to push you through that journey.
Secondly, the immersion phase I mentioned earlier, which I think is also crucial and helps build a trusted relationship with each other.
Being able to take that time to understand what's our context, design the contents that is right for our internal audiences, but also understanding the kind of constraints and circumstances we're working in e.g. details such as thinking about the timing of the training, is it too long? Is it too short? How can make sure we build an open learning environment rather than people feeling that they are being told what to do, giving them sufficient space that they can raise questions, challenges, concerns, but also discuss with each other.
Having that immersion phase so that we can build something that is targeted to our audience needs is also quite crucial.
Then lastly, I think it's about the relationship with CARMA and seeing them as your critical friend, using them as your advocates. I do appreciate that a lot of times I can bounce off ideas with Orla from the CARMA team and ask for her critique on some of the work.
The coaching sessions she's delivered have been really helpful. I've heard that in the feedback from my colleagues that she really understands what's the problem and then gives suggestions and helps us push us through the steps that we need to take.
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