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

The August Wilson Red Door Project's ground-breaking production of Evolve is about racial profiling but from a multiplicity of perspectives. In this video, Artistic Director Kevin E. Jones explores what it meant to create the conditions for change.

This resource can help you deepen your understanding of facilitation.

A worksheet from Diamond Leadership that helps in mapping your different types of power - personal and positional. Use this worksheet to identify and cultivate your specific base of power, so you can remain effective and resilient, regardless of the challenges you face.

This resource provides detailed instructions for practitioners to create an actor map, which is a visual depiction of the key organizations and individuals that influence a topic or system.

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 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 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 helps practitioners to reflect on how ready or well positioned they are to work in an adaptive, systemic way.

This resource describes different types of insight, the attributes of a good insight, the place of insights in design processes, and how to create stronger insights.

This resource supports practitioners to think through key moments for community members as they participate in the initiative being developed (e.g. from first contact, to participation, to leadership).

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.