How to learn from your project

How to learn from your project

Making time to learn and improve as you go is good practice. And there are lots of benefits if you make it a regular part of your work.

What is learning?

We’re talking about activities to capture knowledge, skills and insights about your work.

Understanding what’s going well, and what’s not working, will help you to run your project and services well. You’ll be able to respond to challenges better. And you’ll be more likely to spot opportunities to improve and adapt your practice.

How learning can help you

Learning can help you:

  • identify what's working well
  • identify and act on things you'd like to do better
  • share experiences, practical tips and ideas with others
  • ask others for help and feedback to tackle challenges
  • reduce duplication
  • show funders and decision-makers how your work makes a difference.

There are different ways to gather learning

We encourage all grantholders to gather and share learning and insights from their work. But we don’t tell you how to do this, because there’s no right or wrong way. The focus should be on what’s useful for you.

You can learn from your own experiences and by talking and listening to others. And you can use evidence that already exists.

A handy guide to gathering learning

If you're not sure how to get started, we’ve put together a guide on capturing and sharing learning. You can also find ideas and inspiration on how to share your findings.

We also have a list of helpful tools and resources.

A guide on how to generate evidence

If you’re interested in taking a more systematic approach to researching or evaluating, you could take a look at our step-by-step guide to generating evidence.