Patricia Rogers's blog

Given the numerous interconnected environmental crises the world faces, there is an urgent need to include consideration of environmental impacts into all evaluations. Footprint evaluation focuses on evaluating the ‘footprint’ that human systems make on natural systems. Importantly, it includes evaluating the potential and actual environmental impacts of interventions that do not have explicit environmental objectives.

We’re excited to be involved in the 2020 IPDET Hackathon – a week-long event in which hundreds of people from around the world bring together their skills, knowledge and inspirations to find creative solutions to challenges of our times.

Or, as the IPDET Hackathon sign-up info states:

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to rapid changes in the activities and goals of many organisations, whether these relate to addressing direct health impacts, the consequential economic and social impacts or to the need to change the way things are done. Evaluation needs to support organisations to use evidence to plan these changes, to implement them effectively, and to understand whether or how they work – in short to articulate an appropriate theory of change and use it well. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly transforming our world.  Individuals, communities and organisations are facing enormous challenges and uncertainty. Limited resources have been further stretched by the climate crisis and unprecedented natural disasters. These global challenges put the Sustainable Development Goals at risk and threaten the well-being of people and the planet. At BetterEvaluation we believe we have a significant role to play in responding to this unfolding situation.

This blog is an abridged version of the brief Innovations in evaluation: How to choose, develop and support them, written by Patricia Rogers and Alice Macfarlan. It builds on a webinar delivered by Patricia Rogers in May 2018 as a joint project of UNICEF, BetterEvaluation and EVALSDGs. This blog opens up some of the issues and questions about why and how to adopt innovations in evaluation, while the brief goes into further detail about innovations that can be useful in addressing long standing challenges in evaluation.

This is the second of a two-part blog on strategies to support the use of evaluation, building on a session the BetterEvaluation team facilitated at the American Evaluation Association conference last year. While the session focused particularly on strategies to use after an evaluation report has been produced, it is important to address use before and during an evaluation.

What can be done to support the use of evaluation? How can evaluators, evaluation managers and others involved in or affected by evaluations support the constructive use of findings and evaluation processes?  

In our recent blog post about using theories of change and logic models better in evaluation, we asked BetterEvaluation members to submit a question or challenge that they have in relation to creating or using theory of change for review by the BetterEvaluation team.

Many evaluations include a process of developing logic models and theories of change – an explanation of how the activities of a program, project, policy, network or event are expected to contribute to particular results in the short-term and longer-term.  They have been used for many years -  versions can be seen in Carol Weiss’ 1972 book "Evaluation research: methods for assessing program effectiveness" -  and they have been mainstreamed in many organisations