Waitemata District Health Board
We evaluated the Healthy Babies Healthy Futures programme, an education programme and support service that’s improving the health of pregnant women and whānau with young babies through innovative and culturally-specific approaches. The programme is jointly delivered by HealthWEST, The Asian Network Incorporated, the Fono, CNSST Foundation (formerly Chinese New Settlers Services Trust) and the National Institute of Health Innovation, with project management and additional governance provided by Waitemata District Health Board (DHB) and Auckland DHB. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
Tania and the team at Cogo worked hard and professionally for our Healthy Babies Healthy Futures programme. Tania’s experience with similar programmes and skill at communicating with all stakeholders made a real difference. The tools that engaged our mothers were user-friendly and painless! Based on their reports, communications and expertise I recommend Cogo and know that Tania and the team will do more than you expect.
Nelson Wahanui, Programme Manager – Waitemata District Health Board
A very short note to congratulate you on the evaluation. Apart from showing really good outcomes for Healthy Babies Healthy Futures, it is so well written and easy to understand. What else can I say?
Barbara Lusk, Portfolio Manager - Ministry of Health
Taranaki District Health Board
We evaluated the Mama Pēpe Hauora project’s Oranga Mokopuna Programme, which delivers training and support to teachers/kaiako and whānau in Early Childhood Education settings across the Taranaki region. Delivered by Tui Ora as lead provider, with input from the National Heart Foundation, Sport Taranaki and Taranaki District Health Board’s Public Health Unit, Mama Pēpe Hauora has improved knowledge and changed attitudes around the importance of nutrition (including breastfeeding) and physical activity during pregnancy and early childhood. More recently we worked with Tui Ora and the team to deliver internal evaluation coaching and develop a programme manual. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
Finally read your interim report in detail tonight and just wanted to say it's one of the most useful external evaluation reports I have ever received. Thank you!
Zanta Jones, Portfolio Manager – Population Health, Taranaki District Health Board
The Liggins Institute, University of Auckland
Over three years we evaluated the Healthy Start Workforce Project, housed at the University of Auckland's Liggins Institute. The project delivers evidence-based professional development programmes to the maternal and early child health workforce as part of the Ministry’s early interventions approach to combatting child obesity. Using multiple online surveys, the evaluation started out as an annual process, maturing to monthly monitoring reports once programme delivery had been fine-tuned and positive impacts established. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
Cogo have been incredibly responsive to our project needs and delivered extremely valuable analyses of our processes as well as our outputs and impact. We have also highly valued Tania’s more informal role as a sounding board and advisor at a strategic level for our project.
Mary Cavanagh, Project Manager – Healthy Start Workforce Project
YWCA Hamilton
We carried out a four-stage research project that supported YWCA Hamilton to engage with women in the Waikato and design new programmes and services based on what women said they wanted: community inquiry and stakeholder engagement, the 2017 Survey of Waikato Women (SoWoW), focus group research, and a follow-up online survey.
YWCA Hamilton wanted to understand the needs of women in the Waikato and we wanted the voice of women in our community to shape the future programmes and services we offered. We selected Cogo to find out ‘what women want’ for us because of the passion and agility they showed when describing the innovative tools they would use to reach a diverse range of women. Cogo did an exceptional job of capturing the voices of women in the Waikato, analysing their needs, wants and dreams in a way that provided our organisation with clear direction and inspiration. As a result of the research Cogo did, we have transformed the programmes and services we offer women and we are now more relevant to the women we exist to serve. Furthermore, the findings of the research have heavily influenced our new three-year strategy. We are proud of where we have got to and the clear direction we have and are so grateful to Cogo – their work really was a game changer for the YWCA. If you are looking for meaningful research to inform the future of your organisation, look no further than Cogo who will deliver transformational insights.
Kimberley Kilgour, President – YWCA Hamilton
Health Promotion Agency
We are evaluating Play Your Best Card, a story-based card game designed to be played in secondary schools and other relevant community settings, with facilitation provided by teachers and counsellors. The first stage of this project delivered insights from teachers and counsellors about the look and feel, and ease-of-use of the game; the next stage will evaluate the impacts on young people who play the game.
I felt that Tania and Jennie really GOT the Play Your Best Card resource and what it was aiming to do, and what we wanted to find out in this first stage of the evaluation. Their report clearly described areas for further inquiry and provided evidence which will help us develop and enhance the resource in the future. We were very grateful that they presented the evaluation process and findings in person to the staff at the Health Promotion Agency in Wellington.
Tania Cotter, Senior Advisor Education – Health Promotion Agency
Cadence Communications
We delivered insights research on New Zealanders’ attitudes to ageing and the use of appearance medicine and non-surgical procedures. The Survey of Attitudes to Ageing in New Zealand, which we designed and distributed, helped Cadence develop an effective communications strategy for their cosmetic clinic client.
Working with Cogo is a breeze. Nothing’s too much trouble, they’re incredibly responsive to our needs – and aren’t afraid to tell us what they think we need. Tania and Jennie seem to have the perfect blend of research chops and thinking-outside-the-square creativity. Plus, they always deliver on time.
Suzanne McNamara
Regional Public Health
We evaluated Health 4 Life, a joint project delivered by Capital & Coast District Health Board (DHB), Wairarapa DHB, Hutt Valley DHB, Compass Health and Te Awakairangi Health Network. Health 4 Life aimed to improve maternal and infant nutrition and physical activity in the Greater Wellington Region through the delivery of consistent messages to Māori, Pasifika, and vulnerable pregnant women and mothers of infants in the first year of life, and their whānau. The project was funded by the Ministry of Health.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Tania in her capacity as an evaluation consultant to a Ministry of Health funded early interventions initiative. Tania quickly grasped the complexities of our collaborative project, and was a high-performing project team member. Tania’s strong client services orientation saw her work as a collaborative evaluator. She understood the contexts and settings within which our partners operated and we relied on Tania as a trusted strategic advisor. Tania had a shared stake in our project outcomes, and she was just as committed to service improvement and sustainability as our partners. Her culturally responsive approaches to evaluation enabled us to co-design analytical processes with Māori and Pacific stakeholders. This ensured that data was collected, analysed and interpreted using a variety of world views. Tania’s excellent thinking skills meant that interpretation occurred in meaningful ways which offered us insights into enhancing our interventions. Her problem solving skills and perceptive lens also better positioned partners to enhance governance functions. Tania was an inspiring mentor to junior evaluators in the team. She is a natural leader, influencer and coach and these qualities most notably translate in her ability to provide strategic advice and developmental evaluation approaches – helping our project to make a difference to people and communities.
Susan Knox, Project Manager, Compass Health
Katabolt
We advised export marketing agency Katabolt on survey design and distribution supporting them to gather insights on how to sell their client’s product into the US market. More recently, for Campbell Naish Marketing we designed and distributed an online survey that delivered insights on consumer patterns in New Zealand’s functional food and health supplement market.
Working with Cogo has been critical to developing an effective targeted survey into the US consumer market. With Tania’s expertise, Katabolt was able to efficiently develop an effective survey delivering clear feedback around our key questions. Tania’s hands on approach also meant that we were easily able to overcome some of the challenges of reaching the right survey participants and successfully gather the data we needed to understand consumer behaviour and identify key market channels.
Campbell Naish, Partner - Katabolt
Be. Accessible
We are Be. Accessible’s research partner, delivering annual programme evaluations for the charitable trust’s work programmes Be. Leadership, Be. Employed and Be. Welcome. We also deliver insights research that is measuring the extent to which Be. Accessible’s social change objective of “getting society to realise people’s potential” is being achieved.
Be. Accessible began partnering with Cogo Consulting in mid-2017. Tania and Jennie took the time to listen and truly understand the mission and purpose of our growing social change agency. Their evaluation process took a holistic co-creation approach, where all decisions were made collectively.
The team at Cogo are fun to work with, respectful and have a huge amount of integrity and empathy. They care deeply about the work that we do and from the beginning, there was a genuine partnership established.
From the start of the evaluation process, Be. Accessible and Cogo have been on the journey together – from understanding the purpose of the research, to formulating the surveys, to collecting a wide range of data, to the support in the post-research ‘now what?’ stage.
Their research process, regular consultation and the outcomes of the research have enabled us to measure how far we have come, how far we have to go and the steps we need to take to get there. Their expertise is invaluable, and we are so deeply grateful for their ongoing partnership!
Minnie Baragwanath, CEO – Be. Accessible
Curative
Using an online survey tool and focus group research, we gathered feedback from website visitors to evaluate the Common Ground website, a Youth Mental Health Project delivered by the Mental Health Foundation, Youthline, Skylight and Curative. Our work helped the project partners better understand who is accessing Common Ground, how they are interacting with the website and supporting services, how valuable the site is for visitors, and how to improve it based on their feedback.
Cogo are very easy and fun to work with. They give careful consideration to their projects to ensure that the evaluation that they provide is both relevant and easy to understand.
We engaged Tania and her team to help us to better understand the effectiveness of Common Ground; a collaborative project between Curative, Mental Health Foundation, Youthline and Skylight, which aims to support parents families and friends of young people so that they can enjoy more positive mental health. It's a complex project, with many stakeholders, and a broad audience.
Tania really took the time to understand the project intention and objectives, to meet with many stakeholders, and to incite feedback and perspectives from a wide representation of the audience. Because of the care, attention, passion and depth of understanding that Tania and her team had for our project, they were able to design an evaluation framework that gathered feedback with real sensitivity for the subject matter. The result was a robust report, which offered useful insights and proactive suggestions. As a result, the project team has been able to reshape the future direction of Common Ground to ensure that we're really meeting the needs of our audience.
If you need to understand the effectiveness of your work, and how to move forward - Cogo can help you uncover the answers.
Eddie Royal, Director - Curative
Whitebait Media
We conducted focus group research in schools for two of Whitebait Media’s children’s programmes - “What Now” and “Fanimals”, delivering insights on what children find funny, their current media consumption patterns, and what kind of content they would like to see on television.
Diversity New Zealand
Our most recent work for Diversity NZ involved building and distributing an online survey that gathered information from wheelchair users about what supports they need during a civil emergency. These insights have fed into Auckland Council’s “Emergency Resilience” project, delivered by Diversity NZ with funding from Auckland Council's Emergency Management Unit.
I've worked with Cogo on a number of projects. I have always found them proficient, reliable and a lot of fun to work with. They have an amazing knack of quickly understanding what information is needed, how to best elicit it and then interpret it in a way that is meaningful and useful. Their reports are accurate, well-presented and easily used to communicate findings to a wide range of audience. I could not recommend them more highly. Oh, did I say they were fun to work with?!
Philip Patston, Managing Director – Diversity New Zealand
Youthline
Using an online survey tool and focus group research, we gathered feedback from website visitors to evaluate the Common Ground website, a Youth Mental Health Project delivered by the Mental Health Foundation, Youthline, Skylight and Curative. Our work helped the project partners better understand who is accessing Common Ground, how they are interacting with the website and supporting services, how valuable the site is for visitors, and how to improve it based on their feedback.
Cogo are very easy and fun to work with. They give careful consideration to their projects to ensure that the evaluation that they provide is both relevant and easy to understand.
We engaged Tania and her team to help us to better understand the effectiveness of Common Ground; a collaborative project between Curative, Mental Health Foundation, Youthline and Skylight, which aims to support parents families and friends of young people so that they can enjoy more positive mental health. It's a complex project, with many stakeholders, and a broad audience.
Tania really took the time to understand the project intention and objectives, to meet with many stakeholders, and to incite feedback and perspectives from a wide representation of the audience. Because of the care, attention, passion and depth of understanding that Tania and her team had for our project, they were able to design an evaluation framework that gathered feedback with real sensitivity for the subject matter. The result was a robust report, which offered useful insights and proactive suggestions. As a result, the project team has been able to reshape the future direction of Common Ground to ensure that we're really meeting the needs of our audience.
If you need to understand the effectiveness of your work, and how to move forward - Cogo can help you uncover the answers.
Eddie Royal, Director - Curative
Hawke's Bay District Health Board
We delivered a strategic review of all evaluation activity surrounding Hawke’s Bay District Health Board’s (DHB) Maternal & Child Nutrition and Physical Activity Programme during 2014-2017. We brought together insights from provider records, internal and external evaluations and other documentation, and supplemented this information with data collected via an online survey distributed to all stakeholders involved in the five services delivered under the programme, from Hawke’s Bay DHB, Sports Hawke’s Bay, the Diabetes Specialist Service, Te Taiwhenua, Kahungunu Executive, Plunket and Mama Aroha. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health. More recently, we’ve been working with Hawke’s Bay DHB to evaluate the Before School Checks and discover what supports good referral rates and positive health outcomes for children identified with a high BMI.
We have worked with Cogo Consulting over the past three years where they have supported us in delivering evaluations for key programmes to improve wellbeing for children in our community. Their evaluation skills and knowledge were invaluable in designing and implementing our evaluation. They personalise the service, including working in the Hawke’s Bay and working with our partner organisations. Their friendly professional staff have been great to work with.
Shari Tidswell, Equity and Intersector Development Manager, Population Health - Hawke’s Bay District Health Board
Fresh Info
We helped Fresh Info to evaluate Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development’s (ATEED) portfolio of sponsored major events by providing online survey design, build and data collection support. Events included Diwali, Pasifika, Auckland Lantern Festival, Pride, World Masters Games and ITM Auckland Supersprint among others.
If you need an evaluation partner then Cogo is an excellent choice. They are intelligent, responsive, and have a can-do attitude. We have worked with Cogo for five years and will continue to do so because they’re great at what they do.
Shane Vuletich, Managing Director – Fresh Info
Mental Health Foundation
Using an online survey tool and focus group research, we gathered feedback from website visitors to evaluate the Common Ground website, a Youth Mental Health Project delivered by the Mental Health Foundation, Youthline, Skylight and Curative. Our work helped the project partners better understand who is accessing Common Ground, how they are interacting with the website and supporting services, how valuable the site is for visitors, and how to improve it based on their feedback.
Cogo are very easy and fun to work with. They give careful consideration to their projects to ensure that the evaluation that they provide is both relevant and easy to understand.
We engaged Tania and her team to help us to better understand the effectiveness of Common Ground; a collaborative project between Curative, Mental Health Foundation, Youthline and Skylight, which aims to support parents families and friends of young people so that they can enjoy more positive mental health. It's a complex project, with many stakeholders, and a broad audience.
Tania really took the time to understand the project intention and objectives, to meet with many stakeholders, and to incite feedback and perspectives from a wide representation of the audience. Because of the care, attention, passion and depth of understanding that Tania and her team had for our project, they were able to design an evaluation framework that gathered feedback with real sensitivity for the subject matter. The result was a robust report, which offered useful insights and proactive suggestions. As a result, the project team has been able to reshape the future direction of Common Ground to ensure that we're really meeting the needs of our audience.
If you need to understand the effectiveness of your work, and how to move forward - Cogo can help you uncover the answers.
Eddie Royal, Director - Curative
New Zealand at Venice
We designed, built and distributed an online survey that gathered feedback on patrons’ experience of the 2017 Venice Biennale patrons programme. The insights we delivered supported project partners Creative New Zealand, Art + Object and Brown Bread to plan for future Biennale, including the allocation of funds and programming of events.
Cogo provided smart and insightful research to assist with assessing past performance and enable forward planning. I particularly valued their calm and efficient service and the way they managed to encourage a large proportion of respondents to the survey. Results were provided in a clear format that was useful and easy to understand. Confidential issues were handled with discretion and I would not hesitate to recommend them or engage their services again.
Leigh Melville, Patron of the NZ at Venice Patrons Trust
Skylight
Using an online survey tool and focus group research, we gathered feedback from website visitors to evaluate the Common Ground website, a Youth Mental Health Project delivered by the Mental Health Foundation, Youthline, Skylight and Curative. Our work helped the project partners better understand who is accessing Common Ground, how they are interacting with the website and supporting services, how valuable the site is for visitors, and how to improve it based on their feedback.
Cogo are very easy and fun to work with. They give careful consideration to their projects to ensure that the evaluation that they provide is both relevant and easy to understand.
We engaged Tania and her team to help us to better understand the effectiveness of Common Ground; a collaborative project between Curative, Mental Health Foundation, Youthline and Skylight, which aims to support parents families and friends of young people so that they can enjoy more positive mental health. It's a complex project, with many stakeholders, and a broad audience.
Tania really took the time to understand the project intention and objectives, to meet with many stakeholders, and to incite feedback and perspectives from a wide representation of the audience. Because of the care, attention, passion and depth of understanding that Tania and her team had for our project, they were able to design an evaluation framework that gathered feedback with real sensitivity for the subject matter. The result was a robust report, which offered useful insights and proactive suggestions. As a result, the project team has been able to reshape the future direction of Common Ground to ensure that we're really meeting the needs of our audience.
If you need to understand the effectiveness of your work, and how to move forward - Cogo can help you uncover the answers.
Eddie Royal, Director - Curative
Ministry of Health
Between 2014 and 2018, Cogo evaluated five of the seven Ministry of Health funded programmes sitting within a nationwide portfolio of projects in the area of Maternal and Infant Nutrition and Physical Activity. The portfolio has the overall objective of combatting obesity through early intervention approaches.
A very short note to congratulate you on the evaluation. Apart from showing really good outcomes, it is so well written and easy to understand. What else can I say?
Barbara Lusk, Portfolio Manager – Ministry of Health
Blackcurrants NZ
Cogo has conducted annual insights research for Blackcurrants NZ using online survey research to deliver insights on consumer patterns in New Zealand’s functional food and health supplement market, including change in attitudes and behaviour over time.
Cogo has delivered critical insights for us at Blackcurrants NZ over the past 2 years. Tania and Jennie are exceptional at designing online surveys that get the information we really need and at interpreting the results into clear stories that we can deliver to the board and that guide our strategies.
Campbell Naish, Director – Natural Source New Zealand
Fashion Biz
Cogo works with Fashion Biz to engage with its distributor client base in New Zealand, Australia and North America to better understand their ongoing business requirements and capacity issues, and to learn how Fashion Biz can provide them with better support. We also deliver insights research focussed on the end-user consumers of Fashion Biz products to inform the development of new marketing strategies and help distributors drive end-user demand.
Thank you both for that outstanding presentation and of course the impressive survey itself. The buzz in the room after you left tells its own story - they all found it very interesting! It’ll be useful for our conversations over the next three days too. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Please can you send me the preso, they’re all asking for it!
Desiree Clark, Global Marketing Strategist – Fashion Biz
Odyssey
Cogo is providing a formative evaluation of the New Zealand Peer Crowd Projects, a series of collaborative projects that aim to improve wellbeing and reduce alcohol-related harm for young people by using macro-level groupings of youth culture, each with similar values, attitudes, and influences, to target approaches where they will have the greatest impact. We are also developing an evaluation framework for ongoing programme delivery.
Cogo is contracted by Odyssey on behalf of the AOD (alcohol and other drugs) Provider Collaborative, which brings together sixteen organisations committed to making the AOD sector stronger through collaboration and a focus on systems-level change and innovation. These include the Health Promotion Agency, Ministry of Youth Development, Ministry of Health, Counties Manukau Health, NZ Drug Foundation, Community Action Youth and Drugs, Auckland Council, Healthy Families, and Sport NZ.
Ministry of Social Development
Cogo delivered an evaluation of The Hive, a youth engagement platform designed by young people to support other young people to participate more fully in the democratic process. The evaluation results enabled the Ministry of Youth Development (MYD), and project partners Curative and the Department of Conservation (DOC), to better understand the experience of (and impact on) the young people participating in the pilot and learn what opportunities exist to improve their processes.
New Zealand Trade & Enterprise
As an extension of our Diversity Counts tool, Cogo is delivering diversity and inclusion insights research for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE). We are gathering information from NZTE staff from across eight global regions: Australia Pacific; East Asia; Europe; Greater China; India, Middle East and Africa; Latin America; New Zealand, and; North America. The research will support NZTE to better understand how their people feel about diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and what suggestions they have to help build an inclusive culture.
Sport Taranaki
We evaluated the Mama Pēpe Hauora project’s Oranga Mokopuna Programme, which delivers training and support to teachers/kaiako and whānau in Early Childhood Education settings across the Taranaki region. Delivered by Tui Ora as lead provider, with input from the National Heart Foundation, Sport Taranaki and Taranaki District Health Board’s Public Health Unit, Mama Pēpe Hauora has improved knowledge and changed attitudes around the importance of nutrition (including breastfeeding) and physical activity during pregnancy and early childhood. More recently we worked with Tui Ora and the team to deliver internal evaluation coaching and develop a programme manual. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
National Heart Foundation
We evaluated the Mama Pēpe Hauora project’s Oranga Mokopuna Programme, which delivers training and support to teachers/kaiako and whānau in Early Childhood Education settings across the Taranaki region. Delivered by Tui Ora as lead provider, with input from the National Heart Foundation, Sport Taranaki and Taranaki District Health Board’s Public Health Unit, Mama Pēpe Hauora has improved knowledge and changed attitudes around the importance of nutrition (including breastfeeding) and physical activity during pregnancy and early childhood. More recently we worked with Tui Ora and the team to deliver internal evaluation coaching and develop a programme manual. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
Tui Ora
We evaluated the Mama Pēpe Hauora project’s Oranga Mokopuna Programme, which delivers training and support to teachers/kaiako and whānau in Early Childhood Education settings across the Taranaki region. Delivered by Tui Ora as lead provider, with input from the National Heart Foundation, Sport Taranaki and Taranaki District Health Board’s Public Health Unit, Mama Pēpe Hauora has improved knowledge and changed attitudes around the importance of nutrition (including breastfeeding) and physical activity during pregnancy and early childhood. More recently we worked with Tui Ora and the team to deliver internal evaluation coaching and develop a programme manual. The project is funded by the Ministry of Health.
McAlpine Coaching
Cogo is working with McAlpine Consulting to provide insights from primary research to inform and promote their ‘Burnout’ book to be published by Penguin Random House in 2021. Cogo’s “Workplace Wellbeing Survey” will be launched in early 2020 and will gather in-depth insights into a range of aspects of wellbeing in members of the New Zealand and Australian workforces including corporate burnout, based on the Maslach Burnout Inventory.