Swanage Pier

About the work

Swanage Pier Trust (SPT) was awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for the Foundations for the Future project which aimed to conserve, maintain and enhance the iconic Victorian pier in Swanage for the benefit of visitors and the local community. It has also received a National Lottery Community Fund grant to establish a local community radio station (Purbeck Coast FM) which is based at the Pier.

What we did

The Trust commissioned Shephard & Moyes Ltd to produce a final evaluation report for the pier restoration project, which came to an end in February 2023.

Following an initial workshop with the project team and volunteers, we created an evaluation framework and plan for the evaluation.  We then created a suite of quantitative and qualitative tools to capture evidence of what outcomes had been achieved over the life of the project, and supplemented this with monitoring data collected by the team.  We carried out visits to a range of sessions, a focus group with volunteers and 1-1 interviews with a range of project partners. 

We are also delivering a formative evaluation over the life of the Purbeck Coast FM project, producing annual evaluation reports to help capture learning over the project’s lifetime. As part of this we visit activities, speak to volunteers and carry out surveys with the local community in order to understand the impact the radio station has on Purbeck.

The difference we made

Our evaluation reports are helping Swanage Pier Trust to understand what has been accomplished, what outcomes had been achieved, and what learning can be taken forward into the Pier’s future operational plans.