Client: The Nationwide Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Project: Talking About Homes – Evaluation and Reporting
The need
Negative or unhelpful mindsets about homes and housing limit public understanding of the UK housing crisis – both in terms of its causes and solutions. This impacts on how those working to influence housing policy can have meaningful conversations with communities, organisations and government about improving provision of decent and affordable homes.
The Talking about Homes project is a partnership between the Nationwide Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, based on original research, resources and training by FrameWorks.
Their goal was to share framing recommendations with communicators in the housing sector (and anyone writing and talking about homes) with the aim of helping them tell better stories about why homes matter and to influence policy and delivery outcomes.
DHA were appointed to work as a Learning Partner to understand what success looked like, how to improve project delivery and ensure meaningful evaluation.
Our support
DHA began working alongside the project team in 2023 to develop a detailed theory of change. From here, we facilitated ongoing reflection thoughout the project to allow new ideas to feed into key programme design and delivery moments.
At the end of the first phase, we then carried out an evaluation to identify key lessons, including the impact of organisational circumstances on the use of framing and the shared view across participants that narrative change is crucial.
The Phase One Evaluation and a Summary briefing is now available on the Nationwide Foundation website.
Resulting impact
DHA carried out an independent evaluation of the intervention through interviews, feedback gathered throughout the project and analysis of how the framing had been used by organisations as they communicated about homes.
The evaluation helped to identify key areas in which organisations need help to address challenging mindsets and where there might be opportunities to encourage more widespread use of framing. This directly fed into the design of Phase Two of the programme, which reflects these findings.
It also offers a rare systematic evaluation of a framing intervention, therefore adding significantly to understanding of how narrative change works.
This evaluation was written up into a report for the project team and designed for wider dissemination. This ensured the findings were made accessible to external stakeholders – including those in major housing charities.
We identified the need for a short summary to highlight 18 key findings and produced this for online publication.
Our partnership with the project team has been renewed as they develop Phase Two.