Evaluation
Are you seeking to:
-
- Ensure your programs are doing what you want them to do?
- Improve your programs?
- Demonstrate your programs’ impact to leadership, funders, the individuals involved in your programs, and the broader community?
- Contribute to our understanding of mentorship in Alberta?
Evaluation is the tool you need! By evaluating your program, you can achieve all of the above and more. Whether you’re intimidated by the idea of evaluation or an evaluation expert, we have a resource for you! We’ve partnered with the Evaluation Capacity Network from the University of Alberta to offer you several free opportunities to build your capacity to conduct and use meaningful evaluations. Below you can read about how to access our Pre-Eval Webinar Series, Evaluation Resource Website, Evaluation Coaching, and E-Eval Series.
Pre-Eval Webinar Series
If you want to learn more about evaluation, are not sure where to start, or feel overwhelmed by the idea of evaluation, our Pre-Eval Webinar Series is made just for you!
You will learn about the processes behind evaluation and get practical application examples to help you put what you learned into practice. Guest speakers will talk to you about their experiences with building their evaluation capacity and conducting evaluations.
Topics will cover what program evaluation is, when to plan for it, how to build an organizational culture of evaluation, how to get started on your evaluation, evaluate your program within your means, how to gather data that is meaningful to you, ethical issues in evaluation and working with vulnerable populations, and analyzing and mobilizing your data. Full descriptions of each webinar are available on our resource website.
If you watch all 8 webinars, you will receive a certificate of completion.
To access these recordings, sign up for our resource website at eval.albertamentors.ca.
Ethical Considerations: Ethics in Evaluation & Working with Youth & Vulnerable Families
When: April 11, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 PM MT
This webinar will involve a discussion of how to conduct ethical evaluations within your field, particularly in work with youth and vulnerable families. Discussions of power, confidentiality, consent, and trust will help you in planning an ethical evaluation.
Analyze & Mobilize: Using What You’ve Learned from Your Evaluation
When: May 9, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 PM MT
In our final webinar, we will be discussing how to analyze your data, come to final conclusions, and use the results to affect change. We will talk about mobilizing your knowledge and engaging your audiences. This will serve as a nice wrap up to consolidate everything you have learned so far and prepare you for doing evaluations that are useful and meaningful.
Evaluation Resource Website
Are you looking for specific resources, individualized consultation or coaching, or a place to talk to fellow mentoring organizations about their evaluations? Register for our Evaluation Resource website at eval.albertamentors.ca. Recordings of previous Pre-Eval webinars will be available on the site. There are also discussion boards where you can connect with the facilitators of Pre-Eval and fellow mentoring organizations about evaluation topics and questions. Resources are continually shared there to support you in growing your evaluation capacity. Finally, you will be able to access coaching sessions through this website.
Free Individual Coaching
If you’re a partner with the Alberta Mentoring Partnership, you can book free coaching hours with the Evaluation Capacity Network from the University of Alberta. These coaching hours can help you to evaluate your program so you can improve and demonstrate the difference you are making!
During coaching hours, you can get any support you need in planning or doing an evaluation. The goal of coaching is to help you build your knowledge and skills to do evaluations that are meaningful for your organization and fit your resources, including time and people-power.
Some examples of questions you could bring to a coaching session include:
-
- Who are our stakeholders? How can we involve them in our evaluation?
- Can you help us work on our theory of change and logic model?
- Is my evaluation purpose feasible and achievable?
- How can I conduct this evaluation within our resources?
- What is the best way to gather data to answer my evaluation questions?
- Will this survey get me the data I need for my evaluation?
- How can I best analyze this data?
- What do my results tell me? How do I make sense of these analyses?
- What are some meaningful and creative ways to share our results?
To access the sign up link, join and visit our Evaluation Resource Website at https://eval.albertamentors.ca.
E-Eval
E-Eval is a collaborative, flexible, and hands-on learning opportunity offered by the Evaluation Capacity Network and the Alberta Mentoring Partnership. E-Eval focuses on building the evaluation capacity of mentoring organizations. Over the course of approximately 6 months, mentoring organizations plan and conduct meaningful and useful evaluations of their programs. To support their ability to complete these evaluations, organizations join synchronous group learning sessions and have access to individual coaching sessions, a website with resources, and group coaching on more specific topics. The structure, content, and time commitment of the course is flexible based on organizational needs, but previous offerings have involved approximately 27 hours of group training. Networking and co-learning between organizations is also emphasized to provide valuable and contextual knowledge and resources specific to the mentoring sector. Learners will receive a certificate of completion.
Our current offering concluded in April 2021! Please check back for future offerings. To stay informed and learn more about similar initiatives, please sign up for the Alberta Mentoring Partnership’s evaluation email newsletter
“We acknowledge that we are on and support Mentoring for Youth in the traditional territories across Alberta of the many First Nations from Treaty 6,7,& 8, the Métis of the 8 Alberta Settlements, and Inuit people whose footsteps have marked these lands for centuries.”