Servicing a wide range of sectors

Dovetail provides significant support to arts and culture organisations, including helping to articulate the value of arts and culture across Aotearoa and explore the diverse ways this value is experienced. 

We support the arts through: 

• Telling impactful stories by reviewing initiatives to showcase the sector’s contributions. 

• Building evaluation capability within arts organisations to better understand and demonstrate their impact. 

• Informing advocacy work by mapping arts funding ecosystems and providing regional arts umbrella organisations with an evidence-base.  

• Enhancing engagement through understanding audience and visitor experiences. 

Dovetail has built a strong foundation in supporting community resilience, response and planning. We have a nuanced understanding of community resilience and adaptation, community needs and dynamics, resilience factors, and capability building and recovery strategies.  

We support community resilience through:  

• Community needs assessments and consultation processes to inform recovery and resilience planning. 

• Research to inform evidence-based strategies for capability building and recovery. 

• Reviewing community-led emergency response work and initiatives to share good practices and shape future actions. 

• Capturing and sharing the emergency response and resilience efforts of community and social service organisations to highlight their contributions and ensure institutional learning. 

At Dovetail, community development is at the heart of much of our work. We are committed to supporting communities to identify their strengths, respond to challenges, and achieve their goals as well as enabling those that resource communities to ensure their work is effective and equitable. We do this by building knowledge, frameworks, and evidence to strengthen community-led approaches across Aotearoa. 

Our work in the community development space focuses on: 

• Evaluation delivery and outcome framework development to help community funders streamline funding processes and ensure easier and fairer access for diverse groups. 

• Programme evaluation of a wide range of community development initiatives to capture impact and learning.  

• Research with community organisations to explore community strengths, priorities, and more recently, lessons learned from recent significant events, ensuring that local insights inform future planning and action. 

• Developmental evaluation for community initiatives offering real-time feedback and insights to help organisations and initiatives adapt and thrive in complex environments. 

Dovetail delivers extensive knowledge and insights to the mental health and addictions sectors. By offering evidence-based insights, we empower organisations in the sector to enhance services, support their workforce, and create meaningful change. 

Our recent work has included extensive engagement spanning youth services, peer support, workforce development, and addictions. Across these areas, we are committed to fostering innovation, equity, and impact, delivering evaluations that are robust, actionable, and reflective of the lived experiences of those involved. 

We support the mental health and addictions sector through: 

• Workforce reviews and research to understand workforce size, scope, pathways and conditions, providing insights to guide development and growth opportunities. 

• Comprehensive evaluations of pilots and established initiatives, including applying frameworks such as Value for Investment (VfI) to provide a holistic assessment of impact. 

• Knowledge brokering through providing research and strategic advice to inform the development of frameworks and projects, ensuring alignment with evidence-based best practices and sector priorities. 

Dovetail partners with local government to support strategic decision-making, community engagement, and enhance the effectiveness and equity of services. Our work is grounded in robust methodologies that ensure planning and policy development are informed by evidence and aligned with community needs. 

We support local government through: 

• Evaluations and impact assessments of Council services to identify areas of success, highlight opportunities for improvement, and enable informed decisions about future investments and service delivery. 

• Guiding strategic direction through applying future-focused methodologies such as PESTEL analysis to help councils anticipate trends, identify opportunities, and navigate challenges. 

• Structured processes to identify and prioritise the needs, strengths, and challenges of a community to serve as a foundation for planning, policy development, and resource allocation. 

• Building evaluation capacity to build a culture of performance enhance Council’s internal capability to deliver robust evaluative processes.

Dovetail works across the transport sector, spanning a wide range of projects that explore how transport policies, programmes, and urban design shape people’s experiences, safety, and activity. we have a long history of working with key transport- agencies to support innovative practice and help shape the way the sector functions. 

We support the transport sector through: 

• Evaluations and strategic reviews of road safety initiatives, programmes and government policy statements. 

• Research partnerships collaborating with diverse stakeholders to add to the body of knowledge on how the form of urban environments shape people’s activity, experience and interaction. 

• Knowledge sharing to support the design and implementation of innovative road safety projects, drawing on local learning and good practice literature. 

• Facilitation services to explore perspectives, shared goals and future directions. 

Dovetail partners with the health sector to drive meaningful improvements in service delivery, resource allocation, and community health outcomes. With recent project work spanning rheumatic fever, oral health, Pacific health, workplace health and safety, and health workforce pathways, we bring significant expertise and a tailored, collaborative approach to supporting organisations addressing complex health challenges. 

Our work supports bodies at all levels of the health system, including central government agencies, Whānau Ora commissioning agencies, and former district health boards. Known for our ability to navigate complex stakeholder dynamics, we deliver actionable insights that help shape policy, strengthen systems, and empower health providers. 

We support the health sector through: 

• Undertaking research, summative and developmental evaluations and reviews to capture outcomes and learning for continuous improvement.  

• Evidence-based literature reviews on a wide range of subjects to inform service design and delivery.  

• Performance monitoring frameworks and tools to assess the value generated from initiatives and investments.  

• Capacity building resources and workshops to build partners’ performance monitoring capacity and support reflective practice.  

• Rapid reviews to capture learning from incident management responses to assess strengths and limitations for learning for future activity and preparedness. 

• Capability and capacity reviews to inform the development of future operating models.