The Froglife Trust

Staff at The Froglife Trust use a variety of evaluation tools to gather feedback from a wide range of individuals, including participants, referral agencies and carers/support workers. Data collected from this feedback quantifies the work the Trust delivers and demonstrates the positive impact it has on wildlife conservation. This Knowledge Transfer Voucher (KTV) project was conceived as Froglife did not have the in-house expertise or capacity to evaluate the data to provide evidence of the social impact of their work.

The Froglife Trust’s needs

Froglife collect quantitative data on the impact of their activities on an annual basis. They didn’t have the in-house expertise to evaluate the data, in order to evidence the impact on either the behaviour of individuals or the wider society.

This has been a brilliant opportunity for Froglife to work with OU professionals to strengthen our evaluation procedures and processes and resulted in a successful Esmee Fairbairn Foundation funding application to evaluate the social impact of our Peterborough & Fenland Green Pathways Scheme.

Kathy Wormald
CEO The Froglife Trust

The Knowledge Transfer Voucher Project

The Open University (OU) established a joint OU/Froglife research team to develop an evaluation protocol and guidance for Froglife staff to implement, and suggested possible ways of publicising and disseminating outputs. The inter-faculty OU team consisted of Jitka Vseteckova, from the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, Paul Anand and Jo Horne, from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, who collaborated closely with Froglife staff members. The project enabled the team to successfully apply for external funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to carry out an evaluation of the social impact of its Peterborough scheme.

Project benefits

Being able to evaluate and evidence social impact provided Froglife with key information/publicity collateral to relay on social media, in press releases, presentations to health and social services and at educational conferences, plus to other organisations within the conservation sector. The project also enabled OU academics to further collaborate with Froglife. The external grant meant the team could set up it’s first co-designed evaluation with referral agencies such as SEND schools to evaluate the social impact using control groups, further highlighting the impact of the work Froglife has on the lives of disadvantaged young people.

About The Froglife Trust

Froglife is a British wildlife charity committed to the conservation of amphibians and reptiles and their associated habitats. Froglife aims to encourage as many people as possible, from all walks of life, to get involved in wildlife conservation and habitat protection. Central to its ethos, and what differentiates it in the nature conservation sector, is its commitment to helping communities and individuals who have or are experiencing traumatic events in their lives, to be given equal opportunity to help nature and reap the benefits that nature provides. People dealing with traumatic events are often socially and/or economically deprived, which might in turn lead to nature deficiency (this refers to the idea that individuals who do not spend enough time outdoors suffer from a series of behavioural, physical and mental health problems). This observation is more common in deprived neighbourhoods where most of Froglife’s work is focused.