Measuring success and impact helps demonstrate the value of Community Rail Week activities to funders, while creating a clear evaluation that supports learning, evidence-building, and stronger reporting in the future.

The guidance below is designed to help you think through your plans from the start, build a clear route to success, and consider the wider benefits of your activity – not just those needed for funder reporting, but also what will be useful for your own learning, storytelling, and future project development.

 

Building up a picture of success

Plan ahead

When planning your Community Rail Week activities think ahead to what you want to achieve and what the difference is that you want to make (outcomes).  You may have outcomes in mind for the people you are engaging with – e.g. 30 children increased their knowledge of how to plan and make a train journey. Or an outcome may be for your CRP/group – e.g. we have increased our knowledge of how commuters/leisure travellers view our line.

 

How are we going to evidence success?

Once you have your outcomes in mind think about ways that you can capture evidence (numbers, feedback, quotes, pictures) that will indicate success. You can get in contact with your regional support and development team contact to talk through ideas and opportunities.

 

Challenge

Can you extend your activity to incorporate something a bit different this year, to help increase engagement and evidence success?

If you are running a trip, could you incorporate a quiz or show of hands at the beginning, such as ‘how many people know how to…?’ and then again at the end. For example: ‘We ran a trip for 20 people. By the end of the trip, we recorded a 30% increase in knowledge on how to…’

If you are running a stall or an event at a station, consider including a small interactive exercise that people could do easily – e.g. answer a simple question or statement by putting a token in a box (blue for yes, red for no).

When talking to people at the stall, agree on one simple question that everyone staffing the stall will try to ask where appropriate. For example: “Did you arrive today by train?” If you speak to 100 people during the day and 25 of them take the time to answer this question or provide feedback, you can clearly report both your overall reach (100 conversations) and your deeper engagement (25 meaningful interactions).

 

Monitoring activity and collecting evidence of success

We encourage you to use our Impact reporting tool to record your Community Rail Week outputs and collect data and information to help demonstrate the success of your activities. If you don’t currently have access to the Impact tool or would like advice on how to use the tool effectively, get in touch with our training team.

To measure your social media results, you could look at the ‘reach’ of individual posts as well as the engagement figure (which includes comments, likes and shares) and provide a total of these. You can get this information either from each post or using the ‘Insights’ section of your social media profile.

At the end of Community Rail Week we will send out an anonymous feedback form where we will ask for the impact and results from your activities. This will enable us to build a better picture of the impact of the nationwide campaign and benchmark for future years.

 

Get in touch

For more advice or to discuss how your community rail partnership can get involved in Community Rail Week, specific to your area, contact Alice, campaigns and communications manager.