Introduction

The reason evaluation is first in this guide is that it has to be thought through before anyone steps into the room. A strong evaluation plan is essential to any length of workshop or workshop series. This plan is ideally developed by someone with evaluation experience.

At NouLAB, we have worked fairly consistently with Developmental Evaluation (DE) as a method for tracking and assessing our work. DE is appropriate because we are working in complexity and need evaluators that understand the ever-changing, interconnected nature of the work. There are other forms of evaluation such as summative and formative that are suited to other situations.

This guide does not attempt describe how evaluation is done. This is just a reminder that evaluation is essential to demonstrating impact and tracking progress.

Links:

• A Developmental Evaluation Primer by Jamie Gamble

• A Practical Guide to Evaluating Systems Change in a Human Services System Context

• 10 simple rules for measuring the impact of workshops