When you’re building a new monitoring and evaluation strategy or plan for an organisation the one thing that you need to ensure is that the whole team – from the CEO down – understands why M&E is needed and why it is part of their role. Everyone at some point Read more…
A few months ago I included a throw-away comment that clients often determine what the key evaluation questions are going to be before hiring an evaluator. Well, a client took me at my word and asked me and a colleague to help them design, and then deliver an evaluation! Hooray! Read more…
I can see you sitting there thinking “yes I know my stakeholders, what is he on about?” It is one thing to know who your stakeholders are, but do you know why they are involved in your project – what’s in it for them? I had the privilege recently of working with Read more…
It is still too often the case that evaluators write recommendations and then leave them in a report that sits idling away on a server somewhere (let’s get real: no-one prints our reports anymore so the proverbial dust-ridden shelf is a digital myth). It is still too often the case Read more…
Being a consultant is fantastic and frustrating. You get to work with loads of organisations and different teams who are all trying to make the world a better place, and making the world a better place is more important now than ever! But it is also frustrating because you often Read more…
For small and medium sized NGOs this can seem like a tricky question: you know you need some sort of help with monitoring and evaluation but are not sure what sort exactly. So here are the 4 things you need to think about to make sure that you’re buying, and Read more…
It is easy to think that an evaluation is an all-or-nothing kind of service, that you’re buying in expensive skills and expertise and that it is going to take three to six months of detailed data collection and analysis. Well, yes, evaluation can be that and even more. And sometimes Read more…
The last thing that any of us want is a dull evaluation report that sits on a shelf gathering dust. What a complete waste of time and resources that is! To ensure that doesn’t happen make sure that you build in this one thing into your terms of reference: actionable Read more…
When I started out in the nonprofit sector evaluators and consultants were aloof, external beings that descended to inform us of how well we were or were not doing; wrote dense impenetrable prose and made pronouncements that could close a project down. Fortunately much has changed! I do still believe Read more…
Well the snacks are the most important element, they keep your energy levels up! When I mention that to groups of stakeholders that have gathered to work on developing a hypothesis for a programme or intervention, they realise that they are not getting off lightly. There is lots of debate Read more…