The annual Canadian Evaluation Society national conference is taking place in beautiful Ottawa this year over June 15-18, 2014. We look forward to sharing and learning with our evaluation colleagues from across the country and beyond. Check out the conference website for more information.
If you’re in attendance, consider adding these sessions involving Cathexis-ers (in bold) to your list:
- Using Stories to Communicate how Evaluations Can Make a Difference (Rochelle Zorzi, Dayna Albert, Yasser Ismail): This Ignite presentation will share the status of the Evaluations that Make a Difference: Stories from Around the World project, recent learnings and will challenge participants to document and share the impacts of their own evaluations.
- Grow! Grow! Grow! (Yasser Ismail, Martha Krzic, Stan Chase) Pathways Canada and LOVE are two reputable Canadian programs that began as local community initiatives to address social issues & subsequently expanded into national & international programs. The panel will explore how such programmatic growth impacts & redefines evaluation practices
- Shared measurement: Helping organizations measure the same things in the same ways (Rochelle Zorzi, Melissa McGuire, Adina Jacobson, Ivy Oandasan) Measuring a common indicator or outcome across multiple organizations poses unique advantages and challenges. When done right, a shared measurement strategy can show impact of a larger funding initiative or collective strategy. When done wrong, the result is wasted effort, wasted resources, and often unusable data (and lots of it!). Through our past successes (and failures), we’ve developed insights into what works well under what conditions.
- Taking the Plunge: Lessons Learned from Social Return on Investment (SROI) Case Studies (Denise Belanger, Linda E. Lee, Adina Jacobson, Biljana Zuvela): This panel will begin with an introduction to SROI and how it can complement evaluation by presenting outcomes through a social finance lens. This introduction will be followed three SROI case studies undertaken for community-based agencies and funders and what can be learned from these experiences.