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Non-profit organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact they are having.
Non-profit organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact they are having. Photograph: Alamy
Non-profit organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact they are having. Photograph: Alamy

Five tips for evaluating your impact in international development

This article is more than 8 years old

How can impact evaluations actually be helpful? These top tips will save development professionals time, energy and money

International development can be messy – with uncertain, complex settings, and multiple partners with different interests, goals and capacities.

At the same time, we are under increasing pressure to demonstrate impact. We have to show that our projects have made a real change in people’s lives and that donor or taxpayer money hasn’t been wasted.

But impact evaluations, which are often seen as a solution to this, aren’t always used. And in some cases they are unhelpful. So how can we improve the quality of impact evaluations, so that they produce results that are useful?

This is where evaluability assessments come in. By asking whether we should evaluate a project – and if so, when and how – these assessments can improve the quality of impact evaluations.

Here are five other reasons to assess evaluability before starting an impact evaluation.

1. It saves resources and ensures value for money

Impact evaluations are not cheap, so it’s important that we do them right. Investing time to find out if it’s feasible, plausible or useful to do an evaluation is worth it.

Otherwise, valuable resources are wasted on premature or badly designed impact evaluations that don’t get used. You might think that it’s just more work, or an additional cost, but an evaluability assessment will only take a small proportion of the total monitoring and evaluation budget and can save money in the long run.

2. It helps you to reconcile differences before you begin

Why are you doing an impact evaluation? What are you trying to find out? How likely is it that the evaluation results will influence decision-making?

These are important questions. But the answers will differ, depending on who you ask. Different people involved in your initiative – for example donors, project staff and intended beneficiaries – may find different aspects interesting and useful. If you don’t reconcile these differences before doing the impact evaluation, you may find that nobody gets what they want. The evaluation results then end up gathering dust.

There is no guarantee that evaluation findings will be used, but we can assess whether there is a good demand for it.

3. You can do an intervention at any time – but doing it early helps

You can assess evaluability at different stages of an intervention, not just right before an impact evaluation. Doing an assessment at the beginning of a project can help ensure that, when the time comes, evaluability is high. It can identify gaps in the programme logic, make assumptions explicit or help build a robust monitoring and evaluation system that is “impact-oriented”.

4. An evaluation gets stakeholders involved

Good evaluation involves everyone, not just the evaluators. With more development programmes being multi-partner or consortium led, involving everyone becomes challenging. Having a shared understanding of what is required from people, what type of information impact evaluation can produce, and what it can or can’t do, will cool off unrealistic expectations and reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises later on.

5. It helps you prioritise and compromise

One evaluation can’t do everything. An evaluability assessment can help stakeholders prioritise which evaluation questions to focus on and which indicators to collect. Ultimately, this sets expectations for what the evaluation will cover, what it won’t, and why.

Prioritising also means compromising. You will inevitably have to make trade-offs – which is never easy. An evaluability assessment helps you to do this in a transparent way.

Are there any reasons not to do an evaluability assessment?

Yes – like any piece of research it is only worth doing if the findings will be useful and used.

Carrying out an evaluability assessment can have huge benefits – but only if it has potential to influence evaluation decisions, designs or processes.

Similarly, if your programme already has a robust design process and strong monitoring and evaluation systems with good stakeholder engagement, evaluability assessment might not be necessary.

The Methods Lab has recently published a guide to conducting evaluability assessments for impact evaluation. It provides guidance, checklists and decision support to help evaluators ensure coverage of all relevant issues for assessing evaluability. It also provides evidence-based recommendations to impact evaluation funders and commissioners.

Tiina Pasanen is a researcher in the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme at the Overseas Development Institute.

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