EmpathyLab aims to build young people’s empathy skills. Our strategy is based on neuroscience research showing that reading – especially fiction reading – improves our ability to understand other people’s feelings and perspectives. We’re a startup, recently awarded a Nesta Future Ready Fund grant to extend and develop our Empathy Explorers programme in eight Swansea schools.

Nesta emphasises the role of evaluation in innovation and their support has enabled us to create an evaluation strategy which moves us way beyond our previous impact studies (although these have been promising). We’re currently mid-way through our project delivery and evaluation cycle – and with that in mind, here are five things we’ve learned so far.

Our aim is to drive a new empathy education movement by embedding and mainstreaming innovative practices. By using the evaluation process to understand deeply what’s working – and what isn’t – we can develop our own learning and an honest story about our impact. All of this is critical for our organisational development. Faced with the mental gymnastics needed to structure an evaluation framework, any team can quail. But if you treat it as a creative, storytelling process (maybe a bit like a Hack), you’ll feel the satisfaction of going back to first principles and rethinking how you can drill deeper into your social impact.

We particularly enjoyed being able to work in a cohort of Nesta grantees concentrating on how to develop social and emotional skills. And we’ve learned lots about how to measure specific empathy skills, and how to use an externally validated measure (like EmQue, an empathy questionnaire developed at Leiden University).

We rely on our schools’ partners to gather impact evidence. We’re horribly conscious of how hard it is to strike the right balance between gathering rigorous evidence, and the burden on them on top of their normal workload. We had to be honest with teachers about the commitment involved, which was not small. We tested lots of ideas out, and arrived at measures which were genuinely useful to them.

For instance, helping children name and recognise their own and others’ emotions is a key aim. We used a 'before' and 'after' synonyms brainstorm, and an emotion thermometer exercise to capture data. As well as measuring an empathy skill, this also helps teachers achieve reading and writing targets, as children are working at greater depth.

Nesta’s support for grantees gives us access to University of Sussex researchers. They are a wonderful sounding board, helping us build a framework with a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative measures, and pointing us in the direction of research findings and methodologies that have really expanded our thinking. Not every innovator has access to this level of support, but it should be possible to involve someone to act as a critical friend to the evaluation process. This could be a distinct role, separate from normal board/advisor support for your work.

In the hurly-burly of a school term, we found that written briefings weren’t enough to ensure each element of the evaluation process was carried out. We got real buy-in and understanding by having a workshop that ran through everything again. We appended this to a training day teachers were already committed to, so we weren’t asking for extra time. It also helped to make everything very child-centred, with activities fitting into a normal school day, like writing letters to pupils’ future selves.

The development of empathy skills is a complex area, and we are mindful that factors beyond our programme interventions could have an influence over the course of a school year. We’re also aware of the risk that the externally validated scales might produce data showing limited change, because at the project’s start, children may answer in the way they think the adults want to hear the answers. We have therefore woven in lots of different types of measures, so we end up with triangulated results.

Nesta’s Future Ready Fund is supporting 10 organisations that build social and emotional skills in young people. Read more about the programme and the Future Ready Fund grantees.

This blog is part of Nesta's Field Notes series, where we showcase insights and lessons from the field of social innovation from a different innovator each month, in their own words.