Category Archives: meta-research

What makes a helpful reporting & evaluation system? Learning from an outlier

Posted on January 27, 2016 by

Funders’ reporting and evaluation systems are rarely loved: they are more often regarded as compliance or ‘policing’. But not so for the Inter-American Foundation apparently: IAF received better feedback from its grantees on its reporting and evaluation system than have … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysing giving, Effective giving, Impact & evaluation, meta-research | Leave a comment

The Magic Impact Fairy will ensure that your research really changes something

Posted on January 21, 2016 by

Many charities’ theory of change is: ‘here’s that document you didn’t ask for’ I want to introduce you to someone: the Magic Impact Fairy. Her job is to take all the research that people do and the reports they write, … Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Impact & evaluation, meta-research, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

How come this foundation’s grantees love its reporting process so much?

Posted on July 31, 2015 by

Most charities hate the reporting which funders make them do. Notionally a learning process, it’s often just compliance, box-ticking and a dead-weight cost. But not so apparently for the Inter-American Foundation, an independent US government agency which grant-funds citizen-led community … Continue reading →

Posted in Donor behaviour & giving stats, Effective giving, Impact & evaluation, meta-research | Leave a comment

Deworming: problems under re-analysis

Posted on July 24, 2015 by

A flawed study on deworming children—and new studies that expose its errors—reveal why activists and philanthropists alike need safeguards. The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of all things, offers a critically important message for people who work … Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Great charities, Impact & evaluation, meta-research, transparency | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Is grantee / beneficiary feedback a substitute for RCTs?

Posted on June 2, 2015 by

The short answer is no. At first sight, it seems that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and Constituent Voice (CV: a good way of gathering feedback from programme beneficiaries or grantees) could substitute for each other because they both seek to … Continue reading →

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Non-publication of charities’ research: groundbreaking new project!

Posted on February 2, 2015 by

This was first published by our friends at Evidence Matters. It’s hard to make evidence-based decisions if much of the evidence is missing, ropey, unclear or you can’t find it. Charities produce masses of evidence about their effectiveness but Giving Evidence … Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Fundraising, Impact & evaluation, meta-research | 1 Comment