By Ruby Fischer

Evaluations are like diets – you know they’re good for you, you always start off with good intentions and desperate optimism, but eventually you slip back into your old habits. So how do you stick to them? Here are 5 tips from AES NSW’s latest seminar on how NGOs can stick with evaluation in our do-more-with-less world.

By Zazie Tolmer

Late last year an opportunity came up for a Clear Horizon consultant to work full time as an embedded evaluator in a Collective Impact initiative. I jumped at the opportunity and have been part of the backbone team for the last eight months.

By Gerard Atkinson

Have you ever felt like you have put in a lot of work on an evaluation, only to find that what you have delivered hasn’t had the reach or engagement you expected? I’m not sure I have met an evaluator who hasn’t felt this way at least once in their career.

It was because of this that late last month I led a session at the 2018 Australasian Evaluation Society conference in Launceston, titled “Evolving the evaluation deliverable”.

By Liz Smith

At the 2018 AES conference, Ignite presentations were introduced to light some fire in our evaluation belly. Ignite presentations are a set formula of five minutes and 20 slides with each slide advancing automatically after 15 seconds. Presenters have to concisely and quickly pitch their idea.

By Denika Blacklock

I have been working in development for 15 years and have specialised in M&E for the past 10 years. In all that time, I have never been asked to design an M&E framework for or undertake an evaluation of a project which did not focus entirely on a logframe. Understandably, it is a practical tool for measuring results – particularly quantitative results – in development projects.

by Alicia McCoy, Alison Rogers, Leanne Kelly

Evaluation in NGOs in Australia has evolved at a fast pace. Ten years ago, the evaluation landscape in the non-profit sector in Australia looked very different than it does today. There was less evaluation occurring, very few organisations had internal evaluation functions, and funders were often satisfied with output focused reports.

by Gerard Atkinson

There is less than two weeks to go until the International Evaluation Conference #aes19SYD, taking place on 15 – 19 September here in Sydney. For those presenting at the conference, it’s time to polish off your presentation skills and get your materials ready. In the theme of “unboxing evaluation”, we’ve unboxed the art of developing effective and engaging presentations and put together an easy guide you can use not just in conferences but in any presentation.

The blog posts offers a few tips.

by Florent Gomez

Have you ever tried to grow evaluation capacity across your organisation? And this, with very limited resources?

At the recent AES International Evaluation Conference in Sydney, I shared some learnings from our successful Evaluation Community of Practice in the NSW Department of Customer Service (previously NSW Department of Finance) and other soft approaches to evaluation capacity building we are using in our department.

by Jade Maloney

Over the last couple of months, evaluators around the world have been grappling with the question of whether and how we evaluate in the COVID-19 context. What can and should be done now, and what should wait? How can we be most useful?

For a recent online session with AES members, which Keren Winterford, Greg Masters and I hosted on behalf of the NSW Committee, I rounded up a range of reflections on these questions to prompt discussion.

by Kwadwo Adusei-Asante

COVID-19 has changed our way of life, including how we evaluate programs. The pandemic has rendered conventional evaluation approaches difficult to execute, and programs have faced new delivery challenges. These are challenging times for organisations that are required to deliver programs and measure agreed outcomes for their funders.

This blog draws on my experience with Constable Care Child Safety Foundation in WA. During these uncertain times, we have been forced to think outside the box and adopt new ways of doing evaluation. Our focus has been on capturing evaluation data when ‘what works’ is preferred over ‘the ideal’.