Hi. I am Donna Podems, and I am an evaluator. For the past 23 years I have conducted and guided evaluative processes in parts of the United States, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. While being an evaluator is not a bed of roses, I can&
What is the responsibility of evaluators in the era in which we live today? This is one of the issues I raised in my keynote presentation at the UK Evaluation Society earlier this year, and which I want to address here. This question has been with me for a long
Deborah is a highly successful, dynamic and influential evaluation professional with boundless energy that inspires wherever she goes - including many young people, as I observed when I had the pleasure of teaching earlier this year in her Executive Leadership Programme for Evaluation and the SDGs at the Claremont Evaluation Centre
Have you ever worked with a Research Maturity Model? Or an Evaluation Maturity Model? A 'maturity model' with well-designed sets of evaluative rubrics can be very useful in framing the level of maturity of almost anything in an organisational context. Progress made from one level to the
Others in this series will, I trust, give you useful technical tips on evaluation designs, methods, data collection and analytical techniques - the tools in the evaluator's toolbox. Here, however, is a set of hard-won and generally practical lessons to using those tools effectively as an evaluation practitioner.
In this short series of posts about the NICE Framework I argue for more intensive and creative research and innovation in evaluation - especially research that is rooted in, and respectful of important nuances in different societies. We need to create a strong research agenda for evaluation with solid linkages to
We still have many opportunities to re-imagine evaluation and to combine this with the best evaluation knowledge we already have available. Indigenous evaluators in Latin America, as well as nearly all evaluators in Africa and Asia can still do much to consider what evaluation would have looked like "
It is in the West, primarily in the US, where systematic evaluation as we practice it today originated sometime in the early part of the last century. (Of course, we should remember that the Chinese were the first to develop systematic evaluative action for decision-making already during the Han
For young and emerging evaluators there is plenty of advice about how to gain the necessary skills and knowledge, and how to get the right experience in evaluation. These technical aspects of evaluation are very important. A part of being an evaluation consultant, one that people rarely talk about, is
Unprecedented wildfires, deadly heatwaves, extraordinary floods, storms and droughts from California to Sweden, from Greece to Japan. The northern summer of 2018 has given us a preview of what the greenhouse world will look like, as countries and governments have become increasingly divided and inward looking, struggling to find solutions
