Over the course of two days packed with learning, we’ll help you build a plan for systems change evaluation that suits your unique context. We’ll help you understand the unique challenges and opportunities inherent to evaluating systems change, explore principles and practices that can guide your work, build your palette of evaluation tools, and learn how a design-based approach can help you bring these elements together to create systems change evaluations that deliver impact.
*Please note that minor changes may still be made to this agenda. A final version will be sent to participants prior to the workshop date.
7:30am - Registration and networking over Coffee & Tea
8:30am - Welcoming the Learning Community
9:00am - Introduction: The Approach. Bringing Together Systems Change, Evaluation, and Design
9:30am - Module 1: Understanding Systems Implications for Evaluation
10:15am - Break
10:30am - Module 2: A Design Approach to Evaluation
12:15pm- Lunch and Networking
1:00pm- Module 3: Principles & Practices for Systems Change Evaluation
3:00pm - Break
3:15pm - Module 4: Choosing the Right Evaluation Methods for your Context
4:45pm - Closing
8:00am - Coffee & Tea
8:30am - Welcome and Reconvening
9:00am - Module 5: Capturing Policy Change Results & Scaling
10:30am - Break
10:45am - Module 6: Contribution Analysis: Understanding Contributions to Change
12:00pm - Lunch and Networking
1:00pm - Module 7: Agile Design
2:30pm - Break
2:45pm Module 8: Finalizing Your Canvas & Peer Coaching
3:45pm - Transformational Evaluation With Special Guest Michael Quinn Patton
4:15pm - Closing
Our last session will feature an interview and Q & A session with evaluation expert Michael Quinn Patton to get an early peek at his soon-to-published book, Blue-Marble Evaluation, a systematic and holistic approach to evaluating efforts to change economic, social and environmental systems that cross artificial organizational, sector and political boundaries. This exclusive new session will stretch and inspire you to think about the potential of systems change evaluations.
Watch a previous webinar with Michael Quinn Patton on Principles Focused Evaluation
We’re also excited to share a sneak-peek of our module on prototyping evaluation practices. One of the exciting ways that design can inform the practice of evaluation is in developing evaluation prototypes. Evaluation prototypes give evaluators an opportunity to make their ideas about evaluation practices concrete. They also enable the users of the evaluation practice and findings to offer feedback on the evaluation before large amounts of time and effort are invested. We’re seeing that evaluators are increasingly using prototypes, and in this module we’ll get a chance to dive into some common ways that evaluators prototype, explore what the practice of prototyping looks like from a design lens, and discuss what that might mean for your systems change evaluations.
WEBINAR – Planning an Evaluation of Systems Change
In this webinar on September 11, 2018, Meg Hargreaves and Mark Cabaj explored the ideas and steps required to properly evaluate ‘system changes’ that emerge when tackling complex issues.
PAPER – Evaluating Collective Impact: Five Simple Rules
This paper by Mark Cabaj describes five simple rules that have emerged out of 50 years of trial and error that can assist participants, funders, and evaluators of Collective Impact initiatives to track their progress and make sense of their efforts.
PAPER - An Overview of Community Innovation Trends - Part One: Design-Based Approaches
Read this paper by Galen MacLusky to learn more about the principles and practices that underpin design-based approaches, and how they can be used as part of community change efforts.
PAPER - Evaluating Systems Change Results: An Inquiry Framework
Read this paper by Mark Cabaj, which gives clarity on how to approach the evaluation of systems change and provides three types of results that social innovators and evaluators should consider “mission-critical” to their work.
