EVALUATION
The Climate Coalition
Facilitating learning from a campaign built on collective power
Client: The Climate Coalition
Service: Evaluation
Year: 2025
The brief
When a campaign is powered by thousands of people, spread across different places, organisations, and communities, the learning process needs to reflect that too.
This was the starting point for our work with The Climate Coalition on Act Now, Change Forever – a major mass lobby campaign that brought together climate and nature activists, organisers, coalition members, MPs, and communities across the UK.
For this evaluation, the numbers were only part of the picture. It also needed to capture political influence, movement-building, participation, inclusion, and learning, while staying grounded in the experience of the people taking part.
Our approach
We worked closely with The Climate Coalition to design the learning framework from scratch. This included:
Facilitating a workshop to co-create and refine the priority learning questions
Agreeing outcome areas
Shaping indicators that would guide the evaluation
From there, we used a mix of methods: interviews, surveys, observation, desk research, media and political monitoring, training and support community researchers, and participatory learning sessions.
“Key to our approach was embedding data collection moments naturally into the campaign activities so it didn’t feel like an add-on. For example, we did micro-interviews on the main campaign day where we could really capture the energy and feelings of the day and could reach so many more people than we would have if we had tried to chase people after the event.”
– Patrick Regan, RES Director
An integral part of the approach was bringing campaigners directly into the process. We recruited and supported campaigner evaluation champions to carry out their own evaluation research within their networks, helping the learning process to be led and rooted in local experience.
We also facilitated a participatory debrief and learning workshop with around 30 members of the Coalition’s core working group.
“I really enjoyed championing the evaluation and leading the de-brief discussions with fellow campaigners. It provided us with the framework and tools to think more strategically about how our MP meeting went and what we could do next”.
– Evaluation Champion
What it revealed
The evaluation helped capture both the scale and the feel of the campaign. It showed the strength of a broad, coalition-driven approach: thousands of people took part, local and national lobbying worked together, and many campaigners came away feeling more confident, connected, and energised to keep going. In some local case studies, campaigners spoke about the value of connecting with other local groups and, for some, stepping out of their comfort zone to meet their MPs. It also surfaced more difficult (but equally important) learning around inclusion, accessibility, communications overload, and the practical challenges of organising across a large and diverse coalition.
You can read the report in full here.
This piece of work built on a previous evaluation RES carried out with The Climate Coalition in 2024. These types of evaluation partnerships help give organisations a stronger foundation for its next steps, and the opportunity to keep learning and improving their work.
The RES team involved in the project included Patrick Regan, Tina Puryear, and Anabel Butler.
