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 ...
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 ...
This post shares my experience with a hybrid evaluation in a team of peers, and plea for more unorthodox cooperation in evaluations. Last year I carried out an evaluation as part of a team of three researchers – two from the country of the projec ...
The concept of feminist evaluation gets a great deal of attention these days. Is it just a new label for gender-sensitive evaluation? Given that even gender-sensitive evaluation seems to be a challenge for many evaluation teams and evaluation manage ...
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued a guidance document on Applying a Human Rights and Gender Equality Lens to the OECD Evaluation Criteria. It is wonderful to have this new resource - but a few shortcomings ...