Knowledge Centre blogs

People argue a lot about evaluation and ‘social impact analysis’ (see, they even argue about what it should be called).  They especially love to argue about the ‘best’ way to do it.  Like whether you should or shouldn’t have an external evaluator, or whether you should or shouldn’t do a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT).  Frankly, it can get a bit confusing – so how do you know the best way to ‘do’ an evaluation?  Especially if you're working in social innovation. The answer is that there is no ‘best’ way. more >

We all know capturing social impact is difficult, especially when you’re developing new models and trying new approaches. That’s how we all justify spending so long talking about it ;-)

If you’re working with a consistent cohort of individuals over a significant period of time then you can roll out all the nice traditional pre and post measures to track their progress.  But, real life’s not generally like that.  If you’re working with hard to reach clients sporadically or intermittently, how do you go about capturing and assessing the impact of the work?

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You, like me, probably think of archiving as towers of dusty books locked away in a bomb proof basement somewhere, solely of interest to aged historians.  You might also think that this is a long way from the world of open data, however today I’ve discovered that they may be inextricably linked.  

This is all thanks to Andrew Cooper, Research Manager at The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund who held a fantastic event today with Jack Meyers, President of the Rockefeller Archive Centre to talk about archiving in foundations.  

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