Evaluation of £10M Yorkshire’s Magnificent Journey Project

I’m busy writing up the final evaluation report for the 6 year £10 million Yorkshire’s Magnificent Journey project delivered by the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and funded primarily by the The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The project concludes in July 2024 having delivered a wealth of projects that have transformed the railway and its future including:

• Accessible carriages and signage

• A state of the art £4 million carriage care facility.

• 3 new bridges.

• Award winning lineside conservation initiatives.

• 18 apprenticeships.
• A new Learning Coach and education initiatives including free familiarisation visits

My top tips for evaluating a project of this scale and duration:

• Establish a baseline at the start from which to measure success for each initiative.
• Use a variety of tools to capture staff and volunteer feedback – including evaluation forms and face to face interviews. One to one interviews are great to capture honest first hand feedback.
• Introduce surveys to capture staff, volunteer and user insights and track trends over time.
• Regularly capture examples of materials published during the project and screenshots of social media and websites as they change over time.
• Capture insight from external review sites such as TripAdvisor. Regularly list achievements, including award wins.
• Log all PR and social media coverage. Don’t forget coverage that might not be picked up by media monitoring services, such as specialist titles.
• Log all internal coverage on your Intranet and staff bulletins.
• Save all project meeting notes and presentations about the project.
• Keep on top of regularly filing the information across multiple projects.
• Write up sections as you go along so you can keep track of why decisions were made and other key influencing factors.

This is the second large project evaluation I’ve delivered in 2024. The other was the marketing impact evaluation for the Selby Stories project, funded by Historic England and North Yorkshire Council. If you’d like to chat about project evaluation or audience insight, I’d love to hear from you.