evaluating impact

Evaluating impact is an essential skill in community change. It's necessary for understanding what works, what doesn't and for learning together to understand what needs to happen next.

We are deeply convinced that local and collaborative approaches are a crucial lever in solving complex social issues. Evidence is an important building block in constructing a strong foundation for community change, as it can contribute to strengthening participation, commitment and capacity.

With the right questions and the right set of evaluation principles, values, and tools, communities can make impressive progress on the challenges they are facing.

Online Course

foundations of participatory evaluation

This online course is designed to build a foundation of knowledge and practice for a participatory evaluation, and is available to use at your own pace. Learn alongside a diverse group of Tamarack Institute members and engage in the online platform.

Article

Strengthening Evaluation Literacy

Over time reframing evaluation in our work to be more participatory and collaborative leads to higher levels of learning, strengthened community relations, and greater transparency.

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Developing Evaluations That Are Used

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Evaluating Collective Impact: Five Simple Rules

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Shared Measurement: The Why is Clear, the How Continues to Develop

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Assessing Readiness for Community-Engaged Evaluation

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Collective Impact & Shared Measurement

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Developing an Evaluation User Profile

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evaluating impact at tamarack

Over the last twenty years, people interested in building strong communities have been making important shifts. Eager to “move the needle” on our quality of life issues, they are experimenting with new ways to create community-wide strategies yielding big changes as opposed to hoping that the efforts of organizations and services end up being more than the sum of their parts. This new approach to community change requires a different way to evaluate.

Getting to practice and keeping it simple

Supporting communities in their evaluation processes

Participatory approaches in virtual mode

Equity lens on evaluation and learning practice

Transformation evaluation

Future thinking

System mapping

Communicating impact (impact reports and communication strategies)

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At Tamarack, we are experimenting with new ways of measuring change, exploring who is responsible for outcomes, developing methods that can keep up with the fast-moving pace of community change activities, using alternative approaches for getting changemakers involved in the actual assessment process, and using the results to drive new thinking, better strategies and deeper impact.