Evaluating our activities

Through monitoring and evaluation of its activities, the Energy Saving Trust assesses the impact of its activities and aims to ensure that it has the most useful evidence upon which to base any decisions regarding the effectiveness and development of current and future activities.

The Energy Saving Trust undertakes monitoring and evaluation of all its programmes in order to:

Assess progress against objectives, targets and planned activities.

Assess programme impact including, where appropriate, different elements of the programme and their contribution towards meeting objectives.

Assess market response, including views from the target audience as to effectiveness of the programme.

Quantify the benefits where direct action by the target audience can be attributed to EST activity to determine carbon dioxide (CO2) savings and energy saving benefits as part of EST impact.

Review the effectiveness of programmes in achieving objectives.

Contribute to evidence based policy making through the provision of information to EST policy positions.

The review of the effectiveness of programmes and activities through the evaluation process is to:

Understand the mechanisms by which programmes most effectively influence their target audience/s.

Assess the strengths and weaknesses of different activities.

Determine how programmes interact with each other, external influences and other government activities.

Identify barriers to further progress and make recommendations for potential solutions to these barriers.

All evaluations are undertaken independently of the Energy Saving Trust's operational and marketing functions in order to ensure an objective view of the effectiveness of Energy Saving Trust's activities is presented. Learnings that are identified and recommendations for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of any given activity are provided to and agreed with operational and marketing teams as well as fed into the planning and development of future programme proposals

Quantitative evaluation activity takes the form of impact assessments that aim to identify the carbon dioxide savings that are attributed to Energy Saving Trust activity and the cost of these savings. Impact assessments are undertaken through specifically designed evaluation surveys of individual members of an audience to identify actions that have been undertaken as a result of our programme activities. This is supported by qualitative evaluation, the objective of which is to ensure that we understand how these impacts have been achieved so that important learnings can be fed into the planning and development of any future activity. This is undertaken using in-depth interviews of a small number of users.

The Energy Saving Trust has adopted an audience-based approach to evaluation in order to provide a more cost effective and realistic approach to evaluation across all of our audiences and programmes. Specific evaluations are undertaken for the following audiences:

Consumer audience includes consumer marketing, Energy Saving Trust Advice Centres (ESTACs) and Energy Saving Scottish Advice Centres (ESSACs) and consumer website activity.

Community audience includes the Practical Help and advice service, local authority and housing association outreach, One to One LA support and Community Action for Energy programme.

Trade audience includes trade partnerships, best practice for housing and new build programme.

SME's includes Scottish Business Advice programme

Renewables includes Scottish Community and Housing Renewables Initiative (SCHRI) and Low Carbon Building Programme (LCBP)

Transport includes Fleet Advice, Scottish Travel Plans, Low Carbon R&D and Infrastructure programme

Underpinning activities includes Homes Energy Efficiency Database and Web Information Service Evaluations.

The evaluation of programmes operated on a UK basis will, where appropriate, be reported separately for the devolved administrations.