Summary: A formative evaluation is about improving your program, activity, or intervention. A summative evaluation is about showing proof that it works. Let’s say you run a non-profit food kitchen. You see your job as feeding the hungry people in your community. You have a pretty basic strategy that involves collecting food from the community […]
Articles
Behind the Scenes: Developing a FreshSpectrum Content Strategy
Where do I start? If you read my last blog post, you’ll know a little about my plans to turn FreshSpectrum from being my personal/consulting blog into a kind of evaluation forever conference. At this moment in time, early August of 2025, I have lots of ideas and zero funding. I have done a little […]
What’s Next: Building a FREE Forever Conference
I believe the evaluation world is underserved, let’s change that. I started this blog a little over 15 years ago as a hobby and creative outlet sharing my work with just a handful of people. A year and a half later, I started including cartoons in my posts and growing a following on Twitter. Flash […]
Does evaluation have a resource problem?
This post ended up being really long, with lots of data. If don’t feel like reading it, here is the TL/DR version. I wrote a bit about watching so many of our peers losing their jobs back in February. Unfortunately that was not just a temporary thing. This has been a hard year for lots […]
What is Data Illustration?
Summary: Data illustration is the process of improving the accessibility of a data product by systematically adding pictures. This post introduces the concept and gives you a practical data illustration framework. If you were to search for information about data illustration over Google, you’ll probably end up with a bunch of results about data visualization. […]
What is Benefits Realisation and how does it connect to evaluation?
Summary: While evaluation asks “did this work and why,” Benefits Realisation tracks whether specific organizational wins (like cost savings or better employee retention) actually happened as planned. This week’s post is a guest post by Liz Richardson who is a senior specialist in evaluation at Natural England. As per usual when I have guest post, […]