We believe in evaluation as a tool to inform decisions in an ongoing, timely way. To that end, we employ an equitable evaluation approach that centers the perspectives and expertise of our partners and their communities. Our approach is responsive to community needs and goals and designed to lead to meaningful and feasible recommendations. We work with our partners to clarify the motivation for an evaluation project and identify how to include interested parties, including the individuals they serve, in different phases of the evaluation process.
See examples of our evaluation projects at our Featured Projects page.
Evaluation consulting
ImpactED specializes in mixed-methods evaluation, leveraging quantitative and qualitative sources of data to help our partners learn about the implementation and impact of their programs and services. We tailor the partnership to what works best for your team, whether it’s a short-term engagement (i.e., support over several months) or a long-term engagement (i.e., a more complex project that would benefit from multiple months or years of partnership).
We help organizations develop comprehensive evaluation plans that are aligned to the needs and goals of the individuals and communities they serve. These evaluation plans include three key dimensions:
- Purpose: Clearly defined goals for what organizations hope to learn from engaging in evaluation and key questions about the context, implementation, and/or outcomes.
- Approach: An overview of the proposed evaluation design and a plan for how, and from whom, data will be collected.
- Use: A clearly articulated approach for how data will be shared with internal team members and external stakeholders and used to inform improvements.
- Develop a customized strategy and plan for evaluation: We support organizations in developing a customized strategy for measuring progress towards key outcomes.
- Collect and analyze data: We conduct rigorous and relevant evaluations that leverage qualitative and quantitative sources of data to understand the implementation and impact of programs, policies, projects, and initiatives.
- Use data to inform action: We help organizations develop data use plans that inform internal programmatic improvement and deliver high-quality reports that support organizations to tell their story of impact.
Our evaluation capacity-building programs and workshops help organizations assess and strengthen their impact on the communities they serve by enhancing measurement and evaluation skills. Our supports are designed to provide targeted and collaborative opportunities for applied learning. They are offered in a hybrid format, with both online and in-person components, and are aligned to key elements of our evaluation framework.
- Individual workshops: Topic-specific workshops are for individuals or groups interested in learning more about a particular evaluation topic. While workshops typically focus on a particular dimension of evaluation work, such as strategy, data collection and analysis, or data use, workshops can be tailored to the needs of the individual or group.
- Evaluation workshop series: Our workshop series offer an opportunity to delve deeper into a topic over the course of several weeks. These series typically include two to four learning sessions, each of which provides individual and peer learning opportunities. A workshop series is typically centered around a particular dimension of evaluation work, like evaluation planning or data analysis and visualization, but similar to individual workshops, can be tailored to the needs of an individual or group. Interested in learning more? Click here to submit an interest form.
- Evaluation cohort-based programs: Organizations in our cohort-based programs attend group learning sessions that are customized to meet their evaluation needs and goals and provide individual and peer learning opportunities. In addition, each group has access to 1:1 coaching support that helps them apply learnings from the sessions in their organizations.
