Evaluation and Value for Investment

Value for Money (VfM) assessments of policies and programs often focus too much on the financials and are vague about the actual value delivered. I’m here to change that. The Value for Investment (VfI) approach is designed to provide better answers to VfM questions, combining evaluation methods and tools you already have. It’s open source. It’s taught and used around the world by a growing network of practitioners to make sense of evidence in complex, hard-to-measure contexts. And we’re just getting started.

In Evaluation and Value for Investment on Substack, I’ll share my perspectives on how we can all do better VfM assessments. I’ll share guidance documents, practical tips, lessons learnt in real-world evaluations, and theoretical foundations of good VfM assessment from doctoral research. My aim is to contribute writing that’s interesting, useful, and fun.

Who am I?

I’m Julian. I live in Auckland NZ. My PhD research developed the Value for Investment approach, an inter-disciplinary system for answering VfM questions that combines thinking from evaluation and economics. I provide independent advice, training, on-the-job mentoring, guidance and peer review to help people use this system to design and do good evaluations. My happy places include cycling, skiing, swimming with tropical fish, and anything else that gets me out in nature.

I’m threatening to write a book one day but for now, I’m loving Substack because this series of articles form a living document where we can explore bits of the book one snippet at a time and have conversations about it.

Why subscribe?

If you’re interested in using evidence and explicit values to make good decisions, Evaluation and Value for Investment is for you.

If you work in policy, planning, program funding or management, international development, impact investing, evaluation, or any other context where you want to make the best use of available resources to create social, cultural, environmental and economic value, Evaluation and Value for Investment is for you.

Join us in disrupting VfM assessment!

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To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.