Five tips to make your evaluation more influential
Here is a useful article from the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank. They highlight five tips to make your evaluation more influential as illustrated in the infographic below. I certainly agree with all the tips; I’d just add that influence may not be immediate and direct; it may take for some years to manifest itself and often in unexpected ways (to be explained in a future post!)
Monitoring and Evaluation in a Complex Organisation
Here is an interesting briefing note from the Danish Refugee Council on “Monitoring and Evaluation in a Complex Organisation”
Monitoring and evaluation can be relatively straightforward processes within simple projects, and there are well established procedures that can be applied. However, as this Evaluation and Learning Brief highlights, M&E systems are much more difficult to design and implement at the level of complex organisations. The key here is to strive for balance between an M&E system with too much rigidity, which suits head offices but allows little room for flexibility at field level, and one with too much flexibility, which may lead to a loss of coherence throughout the organisation.
communication evaluation event in Zurich – 28 April 2016
For any readers in the Zurich, Switzerland area, I will be giving a presentation for the EMScom Alumni Association (of which I am an alumni of..) on communication evaluation; here is a short description:
Evaluation of communication activities is consistently named as one of the top concerns of communication professionals. Yet paradoxically not even half reportedly undertake any evaluation. Drawing from his recent PhD studies and over a decade of experience in evaluating communication campaigns and programmes, Glenn O’Neil will set out the challenges and complexities of evaluation and offer insights into solutions and approaches to ensure that evaluation brings value to communication professionals and their organisation
Thursday, April 28, 2016, 18h30-21h00
Widder Hotel, Zürich
Cost: 50 CHF (free for EMScom alumni)
Hope to see some of you there! Further information >>
Register also by email: emscomalumni@usi.ch
Glenn
Short Course on M&E and policy influence: are results worth the effort?
Here is an interesting short course from 5-21 April 2016 that can be taken online:
Presented by On Think Tanks, the course is for individuals and members of think tanks and other policy research organisations who are looking for viable and innovative ways to assess how their own research influences policy-making.
The course helps those looking to:
-Better reflect and enhance the impact of research in public policy,
-Satisfy their (and their donors’) interests in enhancing the uptake of research in policy,
-Build their reputation and visibility and attract more and better support to their work,
-Organise what they are already doing so that it can be useful for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning purposes -and let go of processes that may not be useful.
Further information and registration>>
New evaluation for Africa blog
Africa is a continent often the subject of many evaluations but rarely do we hear from evaluators in Africa. Well hopefully that is about to change with the newly launched Evaluation for Africa blog – with contributions from African evaluators – there are already some very interesting posts to read on assumptions in evaluation and thinking evaluatively.
communication evaluation in UN agencies
The UN Joint Inspection Unit (JIU), an external oversight body of all of the United Nations, has just produced a very interesting study on Public information and communications policies and practices in the United Nations system (pdf)
Aside from providing an interesting and critical view of communications in the UN, the report also looks at the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of communication activities – concluding that M&E needs to better feed into management directions and decision-making. Here are some key findings from the report on M&E and communications:
-Only half of UN agencies have included M&E in their communication frameworks
-Indicators used are predominantly output-based
-There is absence of an evaluation culture among communication staff
– Existing monitoring systems (e.g. for media coverage) were largely descriptive, rarely analysed and did not feed into decision-making.
View the full report here (pdf) – M&E aspects discussed from page 22 onwards.
Adapting M&E at the field level
The NGO Saferworld has published a very interesting Learning Paper (pdf) on their approach to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) focused on the field level. What is interesting in their paper, is that they explain some of the challenges they faced with reporting and logframes and the approaches they adopted consequently – adapting such tool as outcome harvesting and outcome mapping. Also for those interested in advocacy evaluation, many of the examples featured are from evaluating advocacy activities.
EU communication evaluation toolkit
The European Commission has released a communication evaluation toolkit (pdf). Produced by the Directorate General for Communication, the kit provides a very good overview of evaluating communication activities and also provides individual fact sheets on evaluating events, social media, publications, newsletters, conferences, websites and even smartphone apps…
View the manual here (pdf)
Interested in more communication evaluation toolkits? see my earlier post for five more toolkits or handbooks.
New online course: Effective and Creative Evaluation Report Writing
I’m happy to announce my new online course on effective and creative evaluation report writing. In this course, you can learn best practices for effective and creative report writing specific to evaluation reports. Learning points and practical exercises are combined to develop skills in putting together an effective and engaging evaluation report.
The course comprises of reading materials, video lectures and practical exercises to ensure practicality of the knowledge acquired. Case studies throughout the course are used to ensure the hands-on approach and development of practical skills in report writing. Checklists, tips and templates are provided to the students for usage in their own report writing.
The course is self-paced and can be completed over 5 weeks; cost is USD $375; The course is presented by TRAASS International and the trainer is myself! Further information>>
See the promotional video here:
Evaluating communication – 4 of 4 key lessons
In my last post I wrote about the third of four key lessons on evaluation for communicators.
My first lesson was “1. Planning is key”
My second lesson was “2. Decide what and how you will measure”
My third lesson was: “3. Find the time & budget to monitor and evaluate”
And my forth lesson is: “4. Analyse and share your results”
Too often, evaluation and monitoring data is not analysed; I’ve seen many media monitoring reports, web statistics and event feedback forms not compiled and analysed – communicators should be looking at such data to help understand what has been achieved (or not) and how activities could be improved. Once data is analysed, you should then see how such findings can be shared with your colleagues and stakeholders. Evaluation findings will be of interest to yourself as they concern your activities but they may also be of interest to others in your organisation and possibly externally (confidentiality taken into consideration).
intelligent measurement 