Services

What can Tonita Taylor Consulting do for you?

SERVICE AREAS

Do you need assistance with:

Figuring out how to assess the performance of your organisation?
Determining what data you need to collect?
Understanding the mechanisms that underpin the success of your programs?
Improving your team’s knowledge and skillset to support monitoring the impact of their work?
Preparing compelling reports which are engaging and readable, and highlight the impact of your work?

Below is a list of the common areas that organisations often require assistance with. Depending on your available resources, the size and skillset of your team, and your appetite for workforce development, Tonita Taylor Consulting can either take the lead, work collaboratively with you, or support your team to undertake one or any combination of these evaluation activities.

Overall evaluation framework design

An evaluation framework provides… a framework… to guide the entire evaluation. It articulates what is being evaluated, how the evaluation activities will be conducted, and ensures a shared understanding of the purpose of the work amongst all stakeholders. Tonita Taylor Consulting will work with your team to understand your program and your evaluation needs, and design an evaluation that is fit-for-purpose within the resources available.

Detailed evaluation planning

A detailed evaluation plan is worth its weight in gold. It is an unparalleled communication tool detailing the who, what, when, where, how and why of the evaluation. It builds on the evaluation framework, articulating the key evaluation questions, and then breaks these down, noting which indicators are being tracked; relevant targets; what data is being collected to report against each indicator; the frequency of data collection; who is responsible; and how the data will be treated. Tonita Taylor Consulting will work with your team to design an evaluation plan that is relevant and feasible.

Research to inform program design

A review of the relevant literature is a great place to start when formulating a program or service model. This environmental scan may guide or confirm what we already know from our practice-based experience, or may suggest alternative models that we might not have considered. Meaningful co-design with relevant stakeholders, particularly the people who are expected to use and benefit from the service, is also critically important. Tonita Taylor Consulting can assist, helping to ensure your programs are evidence-informed and designed to achieve the desired outcomes.

Stakeholder identification & engagement

Not identifying and engaging relevant stakeholders can cause major problems in the successful implementation of your programs, and will undoubtedly impact your outcomes. Tonita Taylor Consulting can support your team to identify the upstream and downstream, and direct and indirect stakeholders, and craft a plan to ensure their appropriate engagement.

Clarifying desired outcomes

Can you hand-on-heart claim that everyone in your organisation is clear about the goals, objectives and desired outcomes of your organisation or the specific program they work in? This is a tough ask, but is critical if we want people to remain focused on outcomes, and not just outputs. It’s also critically important that the activities we do will logically lead to the desired outcomes. Surprisingly, this isn’t always the case. Tonita Taylor Consulting can work with your team to clarify and reach a shared understanding of not just the what, but the why.

Determining & documenting theory of change

A well-constructed theory of change is invaluable – it facilitates understanding of how and why a program is thought to bring about the desired changes in program recipients. It can be used for strategic planning, to identify the current situation, the intended situation, and what is needed to move from one to the other; it incorporates the contextual factors that help or hinder the desired change, as well as the necessary assumptions; and is critical for identifying the data needed for analysis. Determining your theory of change is one of our specialities.

Generating key evaluation questions

Evaluation questions are the high-level questions that the evaluation is designed to answer. How well did it work? Did it meet people’s needs? What aspects made the most impact? Is it the best use of our resources? Identifying and agreeing on your key evaluation questions is necessary to determine what data you’ll need to collect, how you’ll analyse it, and how you’ll present it. Tonita Taylor Consulting will work with your team, and relevant stakeholders, to understand the key questions you want answers to. They underpin everything.

Survey design

Surveys are an efficient way to collect lots of information from many people, but they have their trade-offs. Tonita Taylor Consulting can work with you to carefully select or craft the survey items that will assist with answering your key evaluation questions, whilst being mindful of the burden of data collection.

Data collection activities

The selection of how to collect your data is informed by your evaluation methodology, which is informed by your evaluation purpose. These decisions are aligned to ensure you end up with an evaluation that is fit-for-purpose . The range of data collection activities available to you is extensive, with pros and cons to each. For example, choosing data collection methods that are resource-efficient may introduce additional bias into your data. Sometimes this cannot be avoided, but it is important to be aware of any limitations, as these may influence the extent to which you can trust the data, and therefore use the insights you’ve generated.

Rubric design

A rubric sets out the criteria of merit and standards for different levels of performance. They have typically been used in schools for assessing performance and assigning a particular grade, but when used in evaluation, they make it very clear how and why a program was assessed as performing at a particular level, and support tracking progress over time to see how performance may have been impacted by changes in your activities. Tonita Taylor Consulting loves a good rubric – and would be happy to work with you to create one to assist your work.

Data analysis

The choice of data analysis methods is determined by the overarching purpose of your evaluation. How you select your sample and what analyses you undertake, is guided by whether you need to make inferences about a larger population, or simply describe the population your program worked with, and this is informed by the purpose of your evaluation. Tonita Taylor Consulting can support you to make good decisions about this, to ensure you are best-placed to use the insights generated from your evaluation activities.

Consolidation & integration of findings

Evaluations are often comprised of a variety of activities, which combine to support an evaluative judgement about your program. This consolidation and integration, or synthesis of data is an important final step in any evaluation. Without this step, you may still learn a lot about your program – what it’s doing well and some areas where it can be improved – but you won’t have made an evaluative judgement. Sometimes this isn’t necessary – it comes back to your purpose.

Report writing

Writing a compelling, easy-to-read and understandable evaluation report is a skill. I’m sure many of you have reviewed lengthy evaluation reports that include pages and pages detailing the evaluation methodology and rationale behind it… but you’re still left wondering whether the program worked or not. My commitment to you is an evaluation report that is straight-forward, actionable, and actually answers the key evaluation questions.

Reach Out

Contact Tonita Taylor Consulting for more information about how we can help you with your evaluation activities.