Category: Resources

Eval Cafe

Post author By Brian
Post date January 16, 2019

At the 2017 Canadian Evaluation Society conference, my friend and fellow evaluator Carolyn Camman and I decided to start a podcast on the topic of program evaluation. We were inspired by Kylie Hutchison and James Coyle’s Adventures in Evaluation podcast, which had wrapped up in 2014, and also by the conversations we fell into whenever we met up in person.

Thus, Eval Cafe was born, featuring informal chats on evaluation-related topics – the kind you might overhear at your favourite coffeeshop, if it was frequented by evaluators.

Resources

Online and Learning

Post author By Brian
Post date January 17, 2014

Without denying the various challenges affecting the non-profit / for-impact sector, it’s good to recognize the strengths, capabilities, and resources that we have access to today that would have been beyond our reach as recently as a few decades ago. In particular, I’m thinking about the explosion of online learning resources, ranging from blogs to […]

Resources Thoughts

SPECs and Vision

As the end of the year rolls closer, I have been taking some time to reflect on the work I have accomplished so far through Strong Roots Consulting and where I hope to go. My recent post about Amazing YXE got me thinking about the strengths-based approach that has consistently served as one of my […]

Resources

Evaluation Planning and Grant Applications

Post author By Brian
Post date August 27, 2013

There are tons of great podcasts out there focusing on the non-profit world and evaluations, enough that I can do a full post on that topic sometime. Perusing the back episodes of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Making Change” podcast, I came across a great interview with evaluation mastermind Michael Quinn Patton. He spoke at length […]

Tags evaluation, grants, project support

Resources

Summertime Evaluations

Post author By Brian
Post date June 28, 2013

Summertime and evalin’ is easy Surveys are fillin’, and response rates are high Your dataset’s rich and your graphs are good lookin’ So hush little funder, don’t you cry (With apologies to the Gershwins and Ella Fitzgerald!) Despite the song, summertime evaluation has its own challenges. The nicer weather often signals a hiatus to regular […]

Tags evaluation, survey

Resources Seeds for Thought

Seeds for Thought: Scale

Post author By Brian
Post date May 9, 2013

Today’s Seed for Thought comes from the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s blog, a site that covers (as the name suggests) social innovation and related conepts like philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit organizational development. In the latter category, an article today provided a five-question checklist for nonprofits to assess their readiness to scale and increase their […]

Tags developmental evaluation, evaluation, organizational development

Resources Thoughts

Word Counts

Post author By Brian
Post date April 5, 2013
1 Comment on Word Counts

In response to my post last week on open-ended questionnaires, Sheila Robinson over at Evaluspheric Perceptions explored some of the risks in interpreting this type of data. Without a systematic approach to analyzing qualitative data, we can fall prey to confirmation bias, which as described in her post, “causes us to remember or focus on […]

Tags evaluation, qualitative research, research, survey

Resources Thoughts

What’s in a Question (type)?

Post author By Brian
Post date March 26, 2013
4 Comments on What’s in a Question (type)?

While on Facebook earlier today (I was connecting with some colleagues on a work-related issue, honest!), I came across a survey for a local non-profit initiative. As someone who both identifies as a researcher and generally likes filling out surveys, I eagerly clicked the link … and found myself looking at ten open-ended, fill-in-the-blank questions. […]

Tags research, survey