Tools & Resources

Developmental Evaluation (DE) can be used to evaluate innovative initiatives in complex, dynamic environments, including a range of fields and international settings. Here is a webinar from the Tamarack Institute featuring M.Q. Patton and Mark Cabaj discussing Developmental Evaluation.

For a really useful explanation on the difference between shared measurement and evaluation, read the following blog. 

This resource explains the importance of allowing the process and results of collaboration to emerge, as distinct from applying pre-set solutions.

This resource provides a framework for considering ethics, privacy and safety when engaging community members in design, research and evaluation activities.

A paper by Mark Cabaj on evaluating scaling efforts.

This resource describes successful community leadership development programs through which governments, social purpose organisations and communities can help build leadership capacity.

A 3-part series of downloadable handbooks that walks partners through the process of assessing progress and impact, provides case studies and examples, and sample questions, outcomes and indicators FSG guide for assessing progress and impact with example outcomes and indicators.

This resource includes an overview of what a common agenda is, and a five-step guide for developing a common agenda with others.

This resource provides a comprehensive ‘how to’ guide for forming, running, and harnessing the benefits of working groups.

This tool will help you to map and interpret stakeholder dynamics in your initiative. This tool can be useful at the start of an initiative when you are working out the ‘lay of the land’, if things go wrong, if there is conflict, or if you are not making progress.

This resource articulates four steps in aligning collective effort.

This tool will help you to identify: • Factors that have contributed to the change you seek. • Evidence demonstrating the contribution. • The strength of the contribution. • Identify new means of and opportunities to exercise leadership.

This resource explains how identifying and understanding ‘positive deviance’ will help you understand the kind of solutions that can work in your community – with the resources that are already in place.

This resource introduces design research as an approach and set of methods that are particularly well suited to understanding the reality of people’s lives, what they want for the future and how the current situations help and hinder them.

This resource provides practical guidance on how to and when to engage in horizontal management, which is concerned with working collaboratively across organisational boundaries.