Susan Kistler on BetterEvaluation and Eight Free Training Webinars

I am Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director and aea365’s regular Saturday contributor.

Hot Tip – Collaboration with BetterEvaluation: Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with BetterEvaluation. BetterEvaluation is an international collaboration to improve evaluation practice and theory by sharing information about options (methods or tools) and approaches.

Rad Resource – BetterEvaluation Rainbow Framework: BetterEvaluation has produced a framework that organizes over 200 evaluation options into 7 clusters of evaluation tasks that can help you to plan and manage an evaluation. On their website at http://betterevaluation.org/ you’ll find the framework itself as well as extensive explanation and examples in support of the framework tasks. This resource brings together contributions from evaluators working on the ground in various contexts around the world.

Clipped from: betterevaluation.org (share this clip)

Hot Tip – Series of eight free short-form webinar trainings: BetterEvaluation and the American Evaluation Association are teaming up to bring to you a series of eight Coffee Break Webinars in May. This series is open to the public (please help us to spread the word), registration is free, and the speakers represent deep expertise applicable in both domestic and international contexts. The series of eight webinars walks you through the components of the Rainbow Framework and will include takeaways immediately applicable to your practice:

1. Overview of Rainbow Framework for Evaluation – Irene Guijt
2. Define What Is To Be Evaluated – Simon Hearn
3. Frame the Boundaries of the Evaluation – Patricia Rogers
4. Describe Activities, Results and Context – Irene Guijt
5. Understand Causes of Outcomes and Impacts – Jane Davidson
6. Synthesise Data from One or More Evaluations – Patricia Rogers
7. Report and Support Use of Findings – Simon Hearn
8. Manage an Evaluation – Kerry Bruce

Pre-registration is required and you can register for as many as you would like here: http://comm.eval.org/coffee_break_webinars/CoffeeBreak/BetterEvalSeries

Rad Resource: In 2012, AEA co-hosted a coffee break webinar series with Catholic Relief Services, USAID, and the American Red Cross. This collaboration resulted in a series of four public coffee break offerings, and anyone – AEA member or not – may view the recordings from all four online here. Included in this set are:

• Monitoring and Evaluation Planning for Projects/Programs
• Evaluation Jitters Part I and Part II
• Simple Measurement of Indicators and Learning for Evidence-Based Reporting

We hope to work further with this wonderful team in the future, and currently Scott Chaplowe who helped to spearhead this series is offering an AEA eStudy.

Rad Resource: AEA hosts a weekly Coffee Break Webinar series for members only. AEA members are welcome to attend any of the Thursday afternoon offerings live throughout the year (see list of upcoming offerings here), or to access recordings of over 100 coffee break webinars via the webinars archive (see the public list of what’s in the archive here). If you aren’t currently a member, we encourage you to join!

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.