Data are only useful when used! They do no good buried in reports, sitting on shelves (or shared drives) hidden away. Data, particularly data from an evaluation, are begging to be discussed, contemplated, and put into action! This article discusses some ways to make sure your data are used.

“Confidential” and “anonymous” are words we use quite a bit in the evaluation world. But do you know what they actually mean? This article explores some of these concepts and provides some tips on how to maintain confidentiality.

Eval Academy just released a new checklist for anyone who’s about to start a new evaluation project. Use this checklist to make sure you’re gathering the information necessary to support your evaluation endeavour. This checklist can act as a support tool for you to make sure you have the context you need when starting an evaluation.

Eval Academy just released a new tip sheet for Conducting Interviews. If you will be conducting interviews in your evaluation, then this tip sheet is for you! Whether you’re new to the process or have conducted interviews before, this tip sheet provides a good overview and refresher to make your next interview experience a great one.

While member checking is commonly used in qualitative research, it’s less commonly used in evaluation and we think that should change! In this article, we’ll review what member checking is and why, when, and how you should use it.

You’ve got your evaluation plan; you’ve developed your data collection tools and you’re ready to go live with collecting the data you need to answer your evaluation questions. Step 1: Identify your sample. Step 2. Recruitment. But how do you get participants to take part in the data collection process?

In this article, we share our top tips for running an interview or focus group using a real-time interpreter & reflect on a recent online focus group I completed that utilized an Arabic interpreter.

Eval Academy just released a new template, “Interview Tracking Log.” This template is available as a Word document as well as an Excel file! This Interview Tracking Log can be used by anyone who will be completing interviews to collect qualitative data.

Recently, we’ve had several clients ask us about Developmental Evaluation (DE) including what it is and how it’s done. So we’ve pulled together a few main points about DE in this article.

Bias in evaluation is inevitable. Reflection helps us to identify our bias and when we do, it is necessary to identify sources of bias in our processes, eliminate which bias we can, and acknowledge which bias we cannot.

Eval Academy has just released a new free template to help you Develop a Logic Model.

In this article, we discuss different incentives for participation, explore the biases that offering an incentive can introduce, and guide you in deciding whether to offer an incentive, including what form and value that incentive should be.

Kirkpatrick is probably one of those names/methods you’ve heard about in your evaluation career, but have you ever used it? In this article, we explain how to use the Kirkpatrick model in your evaluation planning, implementation, and reporting.

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.

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).

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.