Evaluations
3/17/20
When the virus shares your name: An update on COVID-19 from the Corona Insights team
The Corona team update on COVID-19, including what we're doing to stop the spread and how we can help you right now.
By David KennedyRead More
8/15/18
There’s No Place Like Home
If you have walked through downtown Denver recently, you know that it is hard to miss the growing homeless population. Civic Center Park has become a meeting place for many in the homeless population—a place where they can gather to share stories, food, and cell phones. Each year, Denver conducts a “Point in Time” (PIT) […]
By Molly HaganRead More
3/29/18
Creative Ways to Get Useful and Actionable Data for a Small Budget Needs Assessment
The American Evaluation Association invited their Topic Interest Groups (TIGs) to each take over their blog for a week in 2018. As part of the Needs Assessment TIG, Beth and Kate were invited to write one of the blogs with tips for doing needs assessments. With help from Matt Bruce, they wrote about how to […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
12/7/17
How do you measure the value of an experience?
When I think about the professional development I did last week, I would summarize it thusly: an unexpected, profound experience. I was given the opportunity to attend RIVA moderator training and I walked away with more than I ever could have dreamed I would get. Do you know that experience where you think back to […]
By Greg HornbackRead More
11/22/17
Measurement Ideas in Evaluation
Kate Darwent and I are just back from the annual conference of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), which was held in Washington, DC this year. We attended talks on a wide variety of topics, and attended business meetings for two interest groups (Needs Assessment and Independent Consulting). Below, I discuss some of the current thinking […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
11/3/17
Keeping it constant: 3 things to keep in mind with your trackers
When conducting a program evaluation or customer tracker (e.g., brand, satisfaction, etc.), we are often collecting input at two different points in time and then measuring the difference. While the concept is straightforward, the challenge is keeping everything as consistent as possible so we can say that the actual change is NOT a result of […]
By David KennedyRead More
9/7/17
Defining Best Practices and Evidence-Based Programs
The field of evaluation, like any field, has a lot of jargon. Jargon provides a short-hand for people in the field to talk about complex things without having to use a lot of words or background explanation, but for the same reason, it’s confusing to people outside the field. A couple of phrases that we […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
9/3/17
When experiences can lead you astray
Many organizations tell me that they hear from their participants all the time telling them how much the program changed their lives. Understandably, those experiences matter a lot to organizations and they want to capture those experiences in their evaluations. Recently I heard a podcast that perfectly captured the risks in relying too heavily on […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
4/11/17
Engagement in evaluation
Engaging program participants in the evaluation is known as participatory evaluation. (See Matt Bruce’s recent blog on participatory research for more detail about this approach.) The logic of participatory evaluation often resonates with human services providers. It empowers service recipients to define their needs and goals for the program. It can be eye opening for […]
By Beth MulliganRead More
11/30/16
Writing an RFP
So you’ve finally reached a point where you feel like you need more information to move forward as an organization, and, even more importantly, you’ve been able to secure some amount of funding to do so. Suddenly you find yourself elbow deep in old request-for-proposals (RFPs), both from your organization and others, trying to craft […]
By Kate DarwentRead More