Patricia Rogers's blog

We’re currently going through a global period of rapid change and adaption, due in large part to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives and work. As our world is changing, many individuals and organisations are finding that traditional evaluation methods are not meeting the needs of rapidly changing implementation or brand new interventions where interventions are being designed as they are implemented. It’s in this context that it’s become important to use evidence and support learning in real-time.

We were saddened to learn of the passing of Marie-Gervais in mid-December 2020.  Marie, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Laval University, Quebec, made a lasting contribution to the French-speaking evaluation community in Canada, Europe and Africa.  

We wanted to honour Marie’s legacy by sharing some of the initiatives she supported and some of her ideas on improving evaluation practice.

This week we wanted to share and celebrate the important contributions to improving evaluation from John Mayne, a Fellow of the Canadian Evaluation Society and twice recipient of the CES Award for Contribution to Evaluation in Canada.

We’re continuing our series, sharing ideas and resources on ways of ensuring that evaluation adequately responds to the new challenges during the pandemic.

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.