Making Evaluations Matter: A Practical Guide for Evaluators

Our evaluation experiences matter – to ourselves and to those we engage with during the evaluation. But to what extent do these evaluations contribute to changing the lives of the people we work with? To what extent are evaluations useful? Can the findings be used and can evaluations be influential in bringing about change? What are the consequences of the decisions we make around an evaluation? Making evaluations matter to the primary intended users of development programmes or initiatives and other key stakeholders is at the heart of this document.

This guide is primarily for evaluators working in the international development sector. However, if you are a commissioner of an evaluation, an evaluation manager or a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officer, you too will find it useful.

Too often evaluations are shelved, with very little being done to bring about change within organisations that requested the evaluation in the
first place. This guide will explain how you can make your evaluations more useful. It will help you to better understand some conceptual issues and appreciate how evaluations can contribute to changing mindsets and empowering stakeholders.

On a practical level, the guide presents core guiding principles and pointers on how to design and facilitate evaluations that matter. Furthermore, it shows you how you can get your primary intended users and other key stakeholders to contribute effectively to the evaluation process.