A wide-reaching initiative like Doorstep Greens has many lessons to be learnt.
Recreation

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Researching and Evaluating Doorstep Greens

Doorstep Greens on film
The Doorstep Greens approach to funding green spaces differs from other grant schemes in the sector. It is important that the value of the approach is appropriately monitored, and that lessons are learnt from how the initiative operates. These lessons should be of great value to green spaces practicioners as more grant schemes are designed to meet the demands of different funders and changing communities.

Doorstep Greens means many things to many people.  To some it is about biodiversity, to others it's simply about helping out people with nowhere safe to play.  Doorstep Greens has a deliberately broad approach to helping people find solutions to their neighbourhood problems through green spaces.  

The Doorstep Greens approach is also quite different to other grant schemes in the sector - it deploys relatively high levels of Advisers - staff to guide people through a complex process.  It makes quite stringent requirements on community groups and local authorities - purposefully stringent - to ensure that sites are secured for the long term and that grant funding isn't just the short-term solution.

In order to evaluate how effective Doorstep Greens is, we decided to use a variety of techniques:

  1. Evaluating Doorstep Greens through storytelling.  In order to gain insight into how people were overcoming some of the 'harder to measure' goals of Doorstep Greens, we tracked 16 projects from 2003 to 2005 as they set about overcoming problems such as 'Crime and Drug abuse', 'Inproving Access' and 'working to reduce vandalism'. These Case Studies help to show the breadth of the achievements by communities all over the country creating Doorstep Greens. 
  2. As Doorstep Greens was significantly over-subscribed, one key point worthy of evaluation has been to look at the level of demand for future green spaces funding.  This report (404kb pdf) (by the Parks Agency) assesses the level of demand, and the detail of what people see as priorities for funding of our parks and green spaces. 
  3. The Parks Agency have also helped us to evaluate the way that the initiative runs and how effective it has been in achieving what it set out to.  They have done this by looking specifically at two topics:  
    • What makes Doorstep Greens unique?  In an environment of scores of grant schemes relating to regeneration, what makes Doorstep Greens stand out?  Does the DG approach actually get good value for money?  The research centres on interviews, DG scheme literature, review and interview key players of other contemporary grant schemes, peer greenspace stakeholders. 
    • Have the community got what they wanted? Does the DG grant process facilitate a meaningful engagement of local people with the green?  Has there been genuine involvement of all sections of the local community, or have applicants been just ‘playing the game’ to meet the funding criteria?  This work involves interviewing and visiting three DG projects per region (24 in all), desk research, applicant and project tracking data from the Agency’s DG project database and examining DG Project Preparation Plans.     
    • You can download the research note (62kb pdf) (a summary), the full report (766kb pdf) and the appendices (902kb pdf).  

  4. We have conducted two extensive customer surveys.  By looking at how we interact with our 'customers', we can learn and make changes to the initiative, and any future ways of working. The main aim of our 2005 survey (272kb pdf) was to gauge the effectiveness of Doorstep Greens team in communicating with the people involved in delivering Doorstep Green projects.  We carried out a similar survey in 2003 (235kb pdf), but focusing more on people who had contacted us about grant applications and the early Project Preparation Plan stage of the initiative. That survey included many people who did not go on to receive a Doorstep Greens grant from us.  

  5. We monitor Doorstep Greens through monthly reports.  This number-crunching approach also has its place, and reporting on how many greens are under way, how many are completed, etc. each month is an important way of being accountable to our stakeholders.

  6. Finally, we value what is to many people the most obvious form of monitoring - taking photographs of what has happened on Doorstep Greens.  We have had a contract throughout the life of the initiative with Nick Turner Photography, and have monitored approximately a third of the sites at some stage.  With the majority of these sites, two or more visits have been undertaken, giving a valuable 'before and after' view of the greens.