Rural enterprise support: evaluation report

3. The Intervention

3.1 Funding and costs

This pilot has been allocated £230,000 from Scottish Government, £60,000 of which came from Scottish Government Digital.

3.2 What was the pilot designed to deliver?

The goals of the pilot were twofold. In the first instance, GrowBiz was funded to continue their provision of business support with an extension into a number of different geographies, the specifics of which are discussed below, and to use a smart village hub and smart village digital platform to enable the improvement in networking capability, digital connectivity, skills and capacity within rural Scottish villages. The project had the following KPIs, as follows:

1. 750 businesses supported

2. 50 new business starts in Perth and Kinross alongside 5 new business starts within each area of the project.

3. 150 events

4. 5 collaborations with local authorities or regional hubs.

5. 1 Smart village hub and 25 smart village Portals (10 in Perth & Kinross and 15 in other parts of Scotland)

The first three of these deliverables have been provided via GrowBiz’s provision of business support, with the fifth taking the form of a specific intervention.

3.3 Methodology of this evaluation

This evaluation has been undertaken by the Scottish Government, and was developed in consultation with those in the Scottish Government responsible for policies in this area and delivery partners. The evaluation has two primary components:

• A survey of intervention beneficiaries
• Interviews and focus groups with intervention participants

The primary goal of the evaluation was to contribute to the development of ‘principles for place-based rural business support’ via the assessment of the approach described above to help inform the future support landscape for rural micro enterprises. To address this goal, the evaluation has sought to understand the experiences of those who have acquired support during the pilot period (October 2019-October 2020). This was achieved using the provider’s management information, as well as a short survey of users of the service and several focus groups with those who had been part of the intervention.

This survey sought to understand how participants viewed the support provided, how it compared to other business support they had received and what aspects of the intervention they viewed as particularly helpful. We received a total of 135 responses to the survey, which was distributed by the provider to individuals who had received support during the designated period. At the interviews and focus groups (total participants = 18) we asked comparable questions, but in a qualitative format.