Evaluating a program is crucial for understanding its impact and effectiveness. However, there are situations where it might not be the right time to conduct an evaluation. This article will help you to determine if now is the time to evaluate your program.

A codebook for qualitative research is a stand-alone document that contains a list of themes, codes, and definitions that you are using in your qualitative analysis. This article outlines the structure of a qualitative codebook as well as steps to follow to create your own.

Whether you’re new to evaluation or if evaluation is your main role, this Style Guide Template is for anyone looking to create consistency among project documents.

Evaluations of any size tend to need to adhere to budgets, whether for financial or human resourcing constraints. There are certain pitfalls that can quickly derail your budget. This article will guide you through some of the most common budget pitfalls to help you plan and support you to stay on budget throughout your evaluation.

In the first article of this installment, we covered what the CE designation is and is not, and talked a little bit about why you might get it. In this article, we will explore what you need to do to gain your CE designation. 

While member checking is commonly used in qualitative research, it’s less commonly used in evaluation and we think that should change! In this article, we’ll review what member checking is and why, when, and how you should use it.

At Three Hive Consulting & Eval Academy, we pride ourselves on being led by three Credentialled Evaluators. But what is a CE? What does it mean?

A style guide is a time-saving tool that helps you be consistent in your formatting when creating client and public-facing products, from evaluation plans to reports and presentations. When working with a team, style guides ensure that team members are working efficiently as they create evaluation products.

Sometimes managing evaluations can feel like herding cats. Despite your best efforts at nailing down methods, timelines, and other evaluation requirements, plans tend to change, especially if you aren’t paying attention.

One of the most common things I see when I work data in excel that others have compiled or analyzed is the under-use of Excel’s computational powers. In part, this has to do with setting up your data correctly to all Excel to do the work.

While we aren’t able to stop your family and pets from ambling by and needing something from you in the middle of an engaging session, we do have some tips to help you maximize your virtual conference experience. Here are 9 things you can do to maximize your virtual conference experience.

Don’t get us wrong, surveys are useful tools and we’re a fan of any survey platform that makes it easier to use the results. But what about when you want to scratch beneath the surface or present a legible graph that will convince the program director or funder that action needs to be taken? This is where the canned survey tools start to falter.

This post explores how we at Three Hive Consulting worked with a community development initiative to evaluate their activities using social network analysis (SNA). This methodology was used to better understand the relationships and foster collaboration between different individuals, groups, and organizations connected to the initiative.

Here at Eval Academy we are big fans of keeping evaluation simple and that includes how we present our evaluation timelines. These four simple ideas use basic software (Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) to create clean and easy to understand timelines.

How can you plan and predict your evaluation activities when they are dependent on other activities? How can you ensure you have the information you need when you need it? This article provides 5 tips to answer those questions and help you create a plan that will actually work for your evaluation.

Recently we used outcome harvesting as part of a developmental evaluation. As with most developmental and participatory techniques, using this method was a bit time intensive, but the results were worth it! Here we share how we used the methodology and what we wished someone had told us before we started.

Evaluators need to write clearly for their work to be used. Although not preferable, the written evaluation report must stand on its own, clearly conveying the key findings and messages. The 9 mistakes below are ones that I’ve come across in my years of writing, editing, and reading evaluation reports.

The process of writing an evaluation report is like cooking. It can be a joyful and meditative process for some and an annoying necessity for others. Both cooking and report writing take practice; the more you do them, the more you refine your processes and find your own groove. While there is no formula to create a perfect reporting process, there are some key steps that can set you up for success.

We share the most salient points from a recent CES webinar about using art as a data collection method, presented by Jennica Nichols and Maya Lefkowich (of AND Implementation). Also, we expand upon how we've used arts-based data collection techniques here at Eval Academy and Three Hive Consulting and how we could be using them in the future.

Reflexivity often falls into that category of things we know we should be doing, but aren't really doing, or things we might be doing, but aren't so sure we're doing right. To try and ease your stress about reflexivity and to help guide your practice, we've compiled our best tips below.