Articles

Explore our latest articles, developed by our team of evaluators and special guests, grounded in real-world experience to support your evaluation practice—whether you're a beginner or an expert.

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Practice Proximity

Part 3 in this six-part series focuses on formatting your report by grouping and spacing elements in your report to enhance readability. Let’s dig a bit deeper into human perception and explore how simply arranging elements on a page can make all the difference when it comes to engaging your audience in your report.

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Consistency Is Cool

This series of posts walks you through how to reno your evaluation reports using six of Canva’s design lessons. Part 1 focused on how to take your audience on a journey using storytelling techniques. Part 2 in this six-part series focuses on how to format your report with a consistent, cohesive look using two formatting elements: colour and font.

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Take Them On A Journey

Evaluators are notorious for bad reporting. According to Jane Davidson it has to do with our training. Often evaluators are trained in social sciences – a world that prepares people for academic style research and how to write scientifically. The problem is this doesn’t work in the “real world.” Leaders and decision makers don’t want to comb through pages and pages of text to try and find findings and what they should do about them. #TLDR

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Scoping An Evaluation: Begin With The Purpose

When you are asked to conduct an evaluation for a program it can be like shopping for a bike - there are various types, sizes and budgets. Designing an evaluation that meets your stakeholders’ needs begins with a scoping process. There are a number of questions that you should ask to scope an evaluation, but ultimately scoping an evaluation focuses on purpose.

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Three Ways To Increase The Chances Your Evaluation Results Will Actually Get Used

Time and time again, we hear of people going through an evaluation only to be disappointed that the findings didn’t give them the answers they wanted. So I’m going to share three ways we help clients use the results from our evaluations.

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Ethical Decision Making In Evaluation

Evaluations are inherently political, which means they are fraught with ethical choices and decisions along the way. There have been many instances throughout my career where I faced an ethical dilemma - here are some things that have helped me silence the devil on my left shoulder and figure out the right thing to do.

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Planning, Support Use, I do some evaluation Kristy Madsen Planning, Support Use, I do some evaluation Kristy Madsen

Strategic Learning And Evaluation – What Boards Need To Know

Recently I was asked by a client about an “evaluation literacy course” for its board. The client’s board members had just attended a strategic planning day and through that discussion felt they needed some “education on evaluation and metrics.” On one hand I thought “bravo, they want to know more about evaluation!”; on the other hand I thought “shit…., I’ve totally failed them as their evaluator – what have I been missing?”

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Evaluation’s Yoda

Like Yoda, Michael Quinn Patton is revered for his wisdom and his power to inspire thinking differently about evaluation ideas. And while he isn’t a small, green humanoid alien there are striking similarities between the two (that go beyond the bald head and unique sweaters).

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