Evaluation + Design: Evaluating Systems Change

Ottawa, ON - May 22-23, 2019

Join us for an innovative evaluation workshop where we dive into one of the most critical challenges for today’s social innovators and evaluators – designing evaluations for systems change.

Community change initiatives across the country are working to tackle a diversity of issues such as early childhood development, health care, education, poverty and homelessness, immigration, and workforce development, but evaluating the progress and impacts of these initiatives is an ever-present challenge.

In the last six years, the Tamarack Institute team has run 10 iterations of the Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes workshop, a three-day session to introduce social innovators, evaluators and funders of community change initiatives to the latest and most practical evaluation ideas and practices.

Building on the series, the Evaluation + Design: Evaluating Systems Change workshop aims to go deeper on one of the most critical – and difficult to assess – challenges of making sustained progress on complex issues: evaluating the changes in the systems underlying complex challenges. As Karen Pittman, CEO of the Forum on Youth Investment and past presenter with the Tamarack Institute noted:

"Programmatic interventions help people beat the odds; systemic interventions help change the odds for people." 

Our Evaluation + Design workshop format provides workshop participants a step by step approach integrating innovation and design techniques with developmental evaluation approaches to develop a scope of work to assess their system change efforts, including:

1. A review of the foundational ideas around evaluation, systems thinking and systems change.
2. A new results framework that outlines ‘archetypical’ outcomes in systems change efforts
3. A template for designing evaluation scopes of work.
4. A set of principles to guide innovators and evaluators in designing and implementing system change evaluations.
5. An exploration of a dozen methods and techniques that should be part of any system change evaluation tool box – and links to scores of other resources for those interested in more.
6. The use of interactive exercises, case studies, and real world vignettes to make ideas and methods concrete.

This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic knowledge and experience with evaluation and are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities. It is not designed for professional evaluators with extensive experience in evaluating systems change.