In 2021 Makerble wrote an impact evaluation report for NetEquality. NetEquality is a programme funded by the National Lottery Fund and delivered by a group of charities with HEAR Network as its lead partner. NetEquality’s is to explore and develop new digital ways for equality organisations to collaborate.

There are hundreds of grassroots organisations in London that support and advocate for marginalised people who experience inequality in some way. Many of these organisations are under-resourced, and while they occasionally collaborate with other organisations, typically they work independently and disparately, thus not reaching their full potential. The purpose of NetEquality is to remedy that.

The NetEquality partners had been exploring the idea of “netmapping”, a way of visualising data to display connections between entities. Early feedback from equality groups was that they were interested in the idea of visualising their connections but they found the netmapping software difficult to use.

Makerble’s evaluation sought to answer the question: How could the NetEquality programme create greater impact? To understand the impact of the programme we conducted interviews with partners and people from grassroots equality-focused organisations.

We found that people’s experience of NetEquality was overwhelmingly positive and there were no explicitly negative comments made at all. The main benefit seemed to be simply bring together people who are passionate but often working alone or against the “system”.

The main specific NetEquality work respondents spoke about was the netmapping tool. People had mixed experience with this. Many thought that a shared up to date information resource was a wonderful idea but had plenty of queries about the reality of the process to built the resource and the tools they had seen up to that point. The biggest issue that was brought up was accessibility.

The partners were excited about the idea of helping their members work together to pursue equality and some emphasised that this would be a long-term project and an iterative building process. However, the project seemed to lack a clear sense of direction, as evidenced by the absence of a theory of change.

Makerble made a series of recommendations on how NetEquality could further its impact in the future, from taking on board feedback on creating a more user-friendly tool and bringing in product development expertise, to truly accepting the iterative process of development and embracing the work-in-progress editions of the netmapping tool.