Heritage Development Trusts programme evaluation

Tender description

The Architectural Heritage Fund is working with the National Lottery Heritage Fund as a strategic partner for a capacity building programme targeted at the heritage trust sector, working alongside the Heritage Trust Network and other infrastructure support organisations where required. This £5 million programme will provide capacity building support and project development grants to between 10 and 13 'Heritage Development Trusts' operating in locations of need and potential across the UK. We wish to appoint an external evaluation consultant for the programme, who will design and implement an evaluation plan to enable us to monitor and assess to what extent the project is achieving the programme aims. Lot 1: We expect the evaluation to be based around four main areas to report on the social, economic, and environmental impact of the programme: 1. Project delivery - To evaluate AHF's performance in delivering the programme. This includes meeting the spend targets in the budget profile, achieving the right balance of geographical and level of HDTs, the amount and type of specialist support offered to grantees, and the fair distribution of grants, in line with our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy. This quantitative information can be accessed through our internal database. 2. Impact on the beneficiaries - To assess evidence of capacity growth in terms of organisational development and the development of a portfolio of heritage assets, as well as the level of engagement and new partnerships with local stakeholders. We envisage this will be collected through the development of a resilience framework with a mix of self-assessment, discussion and interviews in relation to each Heritage Development Trust. 3. Impact on local areas - To evaluate the wider impacts of HDTs and the value they add to their local areas through the projects they deliver and the social benefits they bring, such as employment and skills, tourism, inward investment, new housing and community cohesion. While we appreciate that this is a large and complex task owing to the diversity of HDTs and how the outputs and impacts ripple out into their local areas, we would like the evaluator to build a toolkit or framework that allows the key outputs to be standardised to allow for impacts to be reported across the programme. In order to analyse the lasting impact of the HDTs' activities, this element of work should incorporate a longitudinal survey that will enable the gathering of data over ten years after the programme's completion. 4. Deep-dive learnings from pilot HDTs - To ensure the programme and its evaluation are maximising the insight able to be gleaned from the pilot phase of the HDTs, we wish to commission in-depth studies of the impact that three pilot HDTs have had within their local communities, including economic and social impact modelling on the change that HDT projects have fostered and interview-based insight into local perceptions of the value of conserved buildings and the role played by the HDTs. The chosen areas are: Great Yarmouth, Sunderland and Coventry.