Building a national evidence base

We know that student opportunities are life-changing for the students that get involved. We know that the projects, groups, activities and actions make a massive difference in society. However sometimes having a credible evidence base to show people the impact of student opportunities can be difficult. So in 2016 we posed a series of negative statements to SUs about the work of students’ unions and invited you to prove us wrong. To demonstrate our work makes a difference to students and society we need to consider the case for if it makes no difference at all.

We created 11 simple step-by-step guides to evaluate some specific differences our students’ unions are making. The differences are based on what students’ unions have told us they want to change about the world. The activities are all common across student opportunities (clubs, societies, volunteering, fundraising, media and basic democratic participation).

 

Contributions 2016 This project is now closed. Thanks to everyone who took part. We displayed all the submissions proudly at Students' Unions Conference 2016. You can view all the submissions online now. Our mission to evaluate the impact of students' unions is only just getting started. We will be using what we learned from this project to inform our future work.

 

 

How to take part

The guides offer a straightforward approach to evaluating the evidence, written to be widely applicable and low effort in terms of time and resources required.  Each guide comes in two parts which need to be done together. The first part is quantitative – looking at the numerical evidence supporting any claim in this area. The second part is qualitative – collecting testimony and perspectives on the role of the students’ union in making this change.

Use datasets available to you to build your argument. Then collect personal stories from students to bring to life your students’ union’s contribution.

 

 

 

What students' unions have said about taking part

 

“Sometimes when we're doing work every day we don't stop to think ‘oh that's a good result’. The opportunity was helpful and interesting.”

“The exercise gave us a lot of structure which our team found helpful to get started. We know now how to do this in future to evaluate our impact.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever sat down and tied up data about students’ participation in politics before”

“Setting impacts and trying to evaluate them like this will be useful as we develop our next strategic plan”