Research & evaluation
Stitch Your Parachute can support your business resilience through strategic planning and impact evaluation. Founder Carmel Cardona is an experienced researcher, writer and evaluator, with many years of strategic planning experience, in the arts, charity and social enterprise sectors. Here are some of our consultancy services. Get in touch for a free discovery call.
Strategic planning
In collaboration with you and your team, we can facilitate and develop your vision, mission, strategic direction and/or help you pitch your business for partnerships and funding. This can include facilitation of board and team away-days, support creating business strategies and other key workplans, or helping you plan for a pivot. Contact us with a brief overview of your challenges and goals and we’ll discuss how we can help.
Research Projects
Carmel has extensive experience carrying out qualitative research projects, and is currently a doctoral researcher at King’s College London in the Global Health and Social Medicine department, conducting a research project into the impact of artistic interventions on quality of life in cancer survivorship. Her coaching training, exceptional writing skills and many years conducting marketing research for arts organisations make her an excellent choice to conduct your research. From semi-structured, in-depth, life history interviews, to hosting focus groups, she’s great at putting interviewees at ease, getting to the heart of what they really think, and synthesising recommendations in a report. Recent projects include Arts Council England covid recovery plan, the creation of a Youth Voice resource, and conducting research interviews for a report on EDI in the Music Education sector.
Funding Applications and Evaluation
With two decades of experience putting together funding proposals, grant applications, and evaluation reports, including successful multi-year arts council grants and significant NHLF funding, Carmel now supports individuals and organisations with their applications and evaluations. This includes editing, writing and scrutinising your application form, ensuring that the pathways to impact and evaluation criteria are robust and compelling, and managing your evaluation from beginning to final acquittal. Carmel has also conducted mock interviews and given valuable input into pitch presentations. Successes so far range from a small ACE project grant of £15k to NPO grants of £150k+ to UKRI funding of £1.5million.
