Knowledge Centre blogs

Evaluating social innovation - the what and the when

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 12th April 2013

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 >

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The iceberg has melted, long live the evaluation duck

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 21st February 2013

Getting your head around evaluation and social impact assessment (evaluation’s sexy stage name) can be a complicated process. more >

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Measurement - a force for good?

By: bigdanbro
On: 18th December 2012

This is the first of a three part blog post looking at the three 'classic' challenges in evaluation: measurement, attribution and aggregation. Each blog post starts with a brief summary of the challenge, and then concentrates on trying to offer a different way of looking at the challenge and the issues that surround it. At the end of each blog post I hope to offer some practical tools or ideas that could be used by organisations seeking to effect change.
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From Problems to Conclusions - How do we Share Understanding of Research

By: Simon Knight
On: 13th November 2012

Making sense of our evidence

In her recent Nominet Trust blog Annika talked about the ways Nominet Trust is trying to make sense of the information they have on how technology might be used to open up new opportunities. Creating stories, spotting themes, and mapping ideas have been key to this work. more >

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Evaluation - 10 reasons why you should

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 28th June 2012

People always seem to post pictures of rulers or tape measures when they talk about evaluation, which, frankly, have to be some of the dullest objects in the world.

image Wikimedia Commons

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Evaluation...lost in translation?

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 30th January 2012

In my last post, The quest for the holy metric? I argued that the heart of the shared measurement issue in social development is not an evaluation problem, it’s a translation problem. What we really want to know is how can I translate the social value that I have captured into a language that you understand so that you value the work too? more >