mediadev library

Guide to … Getting the Best Out of a Consultancy

John Rowley

London: Bond (2014), 15 pp.

"Consultancy costs can be a large budget item for many NGOs and so getting the best out of it is essential. This guide provides tips that will help you learn from good practices and avoid common mistakes. It is for staff involved in commissioning and managing consultants, particularly in programmes, ... more

Field Guide for Evaluation: How to Develop an Effective Terms of Reference

Washington, DC: Pact (2014), 96 pp.

"A practical guide to managing and leading evaluation efforts, this module is designed for use in evaluations within your organization and among your partners. Increasing local capacity to conduct and manage good program evaluation is a key goal of the Results and Measurement team at Pact ... Each c ... more

Utilization Focused Evaluation: A Primer for Evaluators

Ricardo Ramírez, Dal Brodhead et al.

Penang: Southbound (2013), xii, 114 pp.

"Utilization Focused Evaluation (UFE) facilitates a learning process in which people in the real world apply evaluation findings and experiences to their work. The focus is on intended users. UFE does not prescribe any specific content, method, or theory. It is a guiding framework, rather than a met ... more

Planning Evaluability Assessments: A Synthesis of the Literature with Recommendations

Rick Davies

London; Glasgow: Department for International Development (DFIP) (2013), iv, 48 pp.

"[...] Amongst those agencies the following OECD DAC definition of evaluability is widely accepted and has been applied within this report: “The extent to which an activity or project can be evaluated in a reliable and credible fashion”. Eighteen recommendations about the use of Evaluability Ass ... more

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Evaluating Democracy Assistance

Krishna Kumar

Boulder, Colo.: Rienner (2013), x, 241 pp.

"A comprehensive, practical guide to the on-the-ground tasks of evaluating and monitoring democracy assistance programs, from planning and implementation to preparing and presenting evaluation reports." (Publisher description)

Evaluating Peacebuilding Activities in Settings of Conflict and Fragility: Improving Learning for Results

Paris: OECD (2012), 97 pp.

"This guidance aims to help improve programme design and management and strengthen the use of evaluation in order to enhance the quality of conflict prevention and peacebuilding work. It seeks to guide policy makers and country partners, field and programme officers, evaluators and other stakeholder ... more

Four Essentials for Evaluation

Washington, DC: Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) (2012), 32 pp.

"When done well, evaluation for learning can help grantmakers, their grantees and their partners improve outcomes on the ground in real time. But doing it well requires that we work with key stakeholders to develop the leadership, the strategies and the systems that facilitate true learning. 1. LEAD ... more

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Essentials of Utilization-Focused Evaluation

Michael Quinn Patton

Los Angeles et al.: Sage (2012), xxii, 461 pp.

"Based on Michael Quinn Patton's Utilization Focused Evaluation, this briefer and more condensed 'essentials' book provides both an overall framework and concrete advice for how to conduct useful evaluations that actually get used. This book integrates both theory and practice and is not only based ... more

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Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation

Clara Hagens, Dominique Morel, Christina Way Alex Causton

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), revised ed. (2012), 133 pp.

Impact: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Community Information Projects

Miami: Knight Foundation (2011), 37 pp.

"This guide will take you through the essential steps for designing an evaluation of your community information project. These steps explain what to do and consider at different stages of the evaluation process: 1. Describe your project and identify your target audience. 2. Identify the evaluation� ... more

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Impact Evaluation in Practice

Paul J. Gertler, Sebastian Martinez, Patrick Premand, Laura B. Rawlings, Christel M. J. Vermeersch

Washington, DC: World Bank (2011), xvi, 244 pp.

"This book off ers an accessible introduction to the topic of impact evaluation and its practice in development. Although the book is geared principally toward development practitioners and policy makers, we trust that it will be a valuable resource for students and others interested in impact evalu ... ation. Prospective impact evaluations assess whether or not a program has achieved its intended results or test alternative strategies for achieving those results. We consider that more and better impact evaluations will help strengthen the evidence base for development policies and programs around the world. Our hope is that if governments and development practitioners can make policy decisions based on evidence—including evidence generated through impact evaluation—development resources will be spent more eff ectively to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives. The three parts in this handbook provide a nontechnical introduction to impact evaluations, discussing what to evaluate and why in part 1; how to evaluate in part 2; and how to implement an evaluation in part 3. These elements are the basic tools needed to successfully carry out an impact evaluation. The approach to impact evaluation in this book is largely intuitive, and we attempt to minimize technical notation. We provide the reader with a core set of impact evaluation tools—the concepts and methods that underpin any impact evaluation—and discuss their application to real-world development operations. The methods are drawn directly from applied research in the social sciences and share many commonalities with research methods used in the natural sciences. In this sense, impact evaluation brings the empirical research tools widely used in economics and other social sciences together with the operational and political-economy realities of policy implementation and development practice. From a methodological standpoint, our approach to impact evaluation is largely pragmatic: we think that the most appropriate methods should be identified to fit the operational context, and not the other way around. This is best achieved at the outset of a program, through the design of prospective impact evaluations that are built into the project’s implementation. We argue that gaining consensus among key stakeholders and identifying an evaluation design that fits the political and operational context are as important as the method itself. We also believe strongly that impact evaluations should be candid about their limitations and caveats. Finally, we strongly encourage policy makers and program managers to consider impact evaluations in a logical framework that clearly sets out the causal pathways by which a program works to produce outputs and influence final outcomes, and to combine impact evaluations with monitoring and complementary evaluation approaches to gain a full picture of performance." (Preface) more

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Institutional Strengthening: Building Strong Management Processes

Baltimore: Catholic Relief Services (CRS) (2011), 666 pp.

"The Guide presents principles, minimum standards and best practices, business processes, references and tools deemed important for effective, efficient, and sustainable organizations. The Guide consists of ten chapters that cover the key functional areas of most organizations. Each chapter (and ind ... more

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Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use

Michael Quinn Patton

New York: Guilford Press (2011), xxi, 373 pp.

"Developmental evaluation offers a powerful approach to monitoring and supporting social innovations by working in partnership with program decision makers. In this book, eminent authority Michael Quinn Patton shows how to conduct evaluations within a developmental evaluation framework. Patton draws ... more

Project/Programme Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Guide

Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2011), 130 pp.

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Making Evaluations Matter: A Practical Guide for Evaluators

Cecile Kusters

Simone van Vugt; Seerp Wigboldus; Bob Williams; Jim Woodhill (contrib.)

Wageningen: Wageningen University & Research Centre Centre for Development Innovation (2011), 118 pp.

"Too often evaluations are shelved, with very little done to bring about change within organisations. This guide will explain how you can make your evaluations more useful. It will help you to better understand some conceptual issues and appreciate how evaluations contribute to empowering stakeholde ... more

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Agency-Based Program Evaluation: Lessons from Practice

Stephen A. Kapp, Gary R. Anderson

Thousand Oaks: Sage (2010), 323 pp.

"Agency-based Program Evaluation: Lessons from Practice, by Stephen A. Kapp and Gary R. Anderson, serves as a core textbook in the advanced undergraduate and graduate social work program evaluation courses. It combines the methodology of program evaluation with the reality of working with agencies a ... more

A User’s Guide to Advocacy Evaluation Planning

Cambridge, MA: Harvard Family Research Project (2009), 22 pp.

"Although the argument for evaluating advocacy is convincing, advocacy has long been considered “too hard to measure,” and so far relatively few advocates, funders, or evaluators have taken on the challenge. But this is now changing. Interest in advocacy evaluation is surging and cutting-edge ad ... more

Guidance on Evaluating Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities: Working Draft for Application Period

Paris: OECD (2008), 96 pp.

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Managing and Implementing an Evaluation: Guidelines and Tools for Evaluation Managers

Alice Willard

Baltimore; Washington, DC: Catholic Relief Services (CRS); American Red Cross (2008), vi, 64 pp.