This evaluation facilitation series will highlight some of these facilitation activities and how I have applied them over the years. This article focuses on their “Making Metaphors” activity, along with some step-by-step instructions you can use to try it in your own evaluations.

A look at how using different evaluation strategies or frameworks can help you to craft perfect evaluation questions.

A book review of Michael Quinn Patton’s Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use (2011).

So you've successfully gathered the data you need to evaluate your program. But how do you engage stakeholders and partners to ensure a thorough understanding of the results? A data party could be part of the answer!

The Likert scale is one of the more commonly used rating scales in surveys. As evaluators, we should know a thing or two about it, and how to navigate some of the decisions involved in using a Likert scale.

If you work with data in Excel, whether frequently or infrequently, learning the basics of PivotTables will improve your ability to quickly explore and analyze raw data.

Part of the job of an evaluator is to identify and define metrics for our clients. But what about you? Are you as disciplined when it comes to defining and tracking metrics for your own business?

Every evaluation is different, but there are a few topics that should be covered in every kick-off meeting.

To celebrate the end of the year, we thought we’d highlight Eval Academy’s top posts of 2021.

Welcome to our monthly roundup of new and noteworthy evaluation news and resources – here is the latest from November 2021.

Recognizing that equitable evaluation is an emerging area of work, this article aims to add to the growing discussion. While it does not include an exhaustive list of issues and strategies, it will help you introduce some changes to your evaluation practice.

The end goal of collecting data is to eventually draw meaningful insights from said data. However, the transition from raw data to meaningful insights is not always a linear path. Data are prone to human-error and this guide will help you correct those errors, as well as provide tips on how to minimize these errors in the future.

Welcome to our monthly roundup of new and noteworthy evaluation news and resources – here is the latest from October 2021.

As evaluators, we are rarely organizational decision-makers; it is our job to provide those decision-makers with actionable insights. In this article we highlight how you can translate data into meaningful findings, or insights, so you can support decision-makers to drive action within their organizations.

What is the scope of an evaluator’s role: should an evaluator make recommendations? Do we tell programs how to improve? Or do we simply share the data with them and let them draw their own conclusions?

A few years ago, we completed an evaluation for a breast cancer clinic. In honour of Breast Cancer Awareness month, we thought we would highlight some excerpts from that report to help inspire your next evaluation report!

Is consent always needed? How do I obtain consent? In this article, we discuss the principles and considerations involved in obtaining consent for evaluation data collection.

Welcome to our monthly roundup of new and noteworthy evaluation news and resources – here is the latest from September 2021.

Ideally, our evaluation projects would proceed as planned. But as all project managers know, sometimes things change. Actually, most of the time, things change! In some situations, our evaluation approach can be modified to adapt to the changing context, but in others, we have to say no to scope creep.

As an evaluator, a big part of our role is to collect data. Sometimes that data comes from administrative databases that require data sharing agreements, but sometimes it comes from people, who need to consent to sharing their information (or data) with you. So let’s talk about what consent is (and isn’t).