Evaluation of Purpose Climate Lab

By incorporating relatable and engaging content, PCL made climate action more accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. Overall, PCL's projects were relevant to their target audiences and were effective in raising awareness of climate issues. However, there was a need for PCL to improve their long-term planning and evaluation, a process which was already underway. PCL was effective at raising awareness of climate issues across all countries. However, there remained a "missing middle" between logic and behaviour change, particularly at the global level. This meant that while PCL was effective at raising awareness, there was less evidence of their impact on capacity and action. PCL was effective at building relationships and increasing participation. The hyperlocal approach they promoted was particularly effective in this regard. However, PCL's short-term projects did not meet the desired long-term outcomes as prescribed in the logic model. This suggested that PCL needed to improve their long-term planning and evaluation.

The following were the key recommendations for improving the relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability of PCL's campaigns:

• Better balance the resources applied for longer-term engagement with privileged audiences while also supporting frontline marginalised communities. This meant ensuring that PCL's work was inclusive and that it reached all of the people who were affected by climate change. This meant revisiting their expectations, design, and strategy. This was especially important to effectively engage more conservative and right-wing audiences, who were a challenging audience to reach, but it was important to do so in order to build a broad coalition for climate action.
• Apply more resources for monitoring project results, and for evidence generation. This would help PCL to better understand the impact of its work and allow them to make necessary adjustments as they went along.
• Focus implementation on action-oriented goals, with longer-term campaigns targeting shifts towards behavioural change. This meant making sure that PCL's campaigns were designed to motivate people to take action on climate change. It also meant focusing on campaigns that could have a lasting impact.
• Treat rapid-response projects differently in terms of the goals, impacts, and resources. This meant recognising that rapid-response projects may have had different goals and objectives than other types of campaigns. It also meant ensuring that PCL had the resources it needed to implement these projects effectively.
• Short-term campaigns would have been more effective if they had been better linked to proof of concept and clearly operated under a ‘strategic’ or test category to avoid a potential disconnect with the long-term strategy. This meant making sure that short-term campaigns were aligned with PCL's long-term goals and that they were designed to test new ideas. ● Ensure sufficient capacity within co-creators (i.e. PCL's partners) was available and that they were aware of the time commitments and capacity required to implement campaigns.
• Consider branding some of the global work to build brand recognition in the climate sphere. This meant making PCL's work more visible to the public. It also meant building relationships with other organisations working on climate change.
• To address potential intersectionality issues, and those linked to Goal 3, PCL should have considered utilising long-term projects that may have been able to have a better impact on the cultural shifts that were required to recognise and appreciate intersectionality. This meant using long-term projects to address the intersectionality of climate change. It also meant working to change the culture around climate change so that it was more inclusive.
• Build on existing relationships to leverage networks to scale up programming. This meant using PCL's existing relationships to reach more people, and also working with other organisations to scale up PCL's work.