Evaluation & Facilitation
For an evaluation to be useful, it needs to be well prepared, typically in the inception phase: That is the moment when evaluators familiarise themselves with what they are supposed to evaluate (the evaluand). For instance, a kick-off workshops woul ...
Good communication is important if you want an evaluation to be useful. There is too much bad communication in the world of evaluation. We have a big jargon problem, hiding our work behind pompous labels and acronyms, and presenting our findings so ...
Everyone can contribute to more equality between genders and people in general, regardless of one's gender, age, skin tone, social class and other aspects. Everyone can do that from their current place in society. But people who are near the top of ...
…play a part in good evaluation. Of course! A friend challenged me on my last-but-one post (Evaluation - a waste of money?), saying that better evaluation terms of reference (TOR) don‘t necessarily make better evaluations. The friend is right. Somet ...
It has been a year (already!) since the conference on theory of change (ToC) development organised by the Methods circle of DeGEval, the German Evaluation Society. We met at the impressive (1950s) premises of DeStatis, the Federal Statistical Office ...
The other day a friend told me something slightly shocking. They felt it made no sense anymore to commission external evaluations - because evaluation quality was shoddy and hardly anyone read the reports, anyway. To see someone draw the conseque ...
Nobody reads evaluation reports. Very few people read the executive summary. What can we do? Evaluation-interested visual designers (like Chris Lysy with his wonderful evaluation cartoons) advocate for visual reports. This week I have done my first ...
The terms of reference are the main guiding document for evaluations. If you commission evaluations, there are some common pitfalls to avoid. I have summarised them in this infograph!
How to make sure an evaluation happens at the appropriate moment, is well-prepared, well-designed and carried out to fulfil its purpose in the best attainable way? When you commission an evaluation, you want it to be done well and to yield exact ...
Last year I carried out a review of evaluations of programmes and projects in (post-) conflict contexts that worked with survivors of sexualised and gender-based violence (SGBV). As the evaluation reports tended to yield limited information on t ...