This article is aimed at those who are new to environmental scanning and are looking for new ways to support program planning and improvement.

In this follow-up article, we will walk you through a step-by-step process of how you can develop your own ToC diagram for evaluation purposes.

This article aims to introduce you to Theory of Change (ToC) and is written for those who may have heard of this tool before but aren’t quite sure as to what it is and how it can be useful for evaluation.

You might have noticed how there seem to be quite a few evaluation tools doing very similar things. It’s no surprise that these tools can sometimes be confused, and the lines can be blurred around when and how to use them. To help you on your way to deciding which tool is best suited to your evaluation, we’ve selected a few of our favourites to compare and contrast.

As a program manager or project lead, you may find yourself needing an evaluator. How do you get that evaluator oriented to the project? What information do they need? Let’s walk through it.

The evaluation world is full of jargon! In this article, we list our back-pocket definitions for some of the most confusing evaluation language.

You’ve completed your qualitative data collection and you’re writing up your report. You step back and look at All. The. Text. If only you had some quantitative data to include in a chart, or some numbers to report! In this article, we talk about 3 ways you can quantify your qualitative data.

Criteria Based Ranking is one tool evaluators can use to facilitate critical thinking and some level of precision in decision making. In this article, we explain what criteria-based ranking is and how we used it in developmental evaluation.

Data integration is a way of merging these data from different sources through mixed methods. In this article, we discuss how qualitative and quantitative data can be integrated at the study design level, methods, or analysis level.

For those interested in calculating sample sizes by hand, or getting a better understanding of the math behind many sample size calculators, we outline the formulae used to calculate sample sizes.

In this article, we briefly define sample sizes, their importance, and how to calculate them (or how to use a tool to calculate them).

In the evaluation world, scheduling can be a nightmare. This article describes how to use Calendly to schedule interviews in three simple steps.

In this article, we describe what assumptions are in evaluation, explain why you should document assumptions, and describe how to reflect on your assumptions when collecting and analyzing evaluation results. We also provide some practical examples of how to include assumptions in your own evaluations!

This article supports evaluators who are new to qualitative data analysis. We start by defining thematic analysis, then give you a 5-step process to complete your own analysis. We end the article by highlighting some common challenges with thematic analysis.

This evaluation facilitation series will highlight some of these facilitation activities and how I have applied them over the years. This article focuses on their “Making Metaphors” activity, along with some step-by-step instructions you can use to try it in your own evaluations.

A look at how using different evaluation strategies or frameworks can help you to craft perfect evaluation questions.

A book review of Michael Quinn Patton’s Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use (2011).

So you've successfully gathered the data you need to evaluate your program. But how do you engage stakeholders and partners to ensure a thorough understanding of the results? A data party could be part of the answer!

The Likert scale is one of the more commonly used rating scales in surveys. As evaluators, we should know a thing or two about it, and how to navigate some of the decisions involved in using a Likert scale.

If you work with data in Excel, whether frequently or infrequently, learning the basics of PivotTables will improve your ability to quickly explore and analyze raw data.