Happy New Year!

50% discount on annual subscriptions

I hope 2025 is off to a good start for you. To celebrate two years of Evaluation and Value for Investment on Substack, I’m offering a special discount for the next few days.

Grab your 50% forever discount here.

Benefits of a full subscription

While a basic subscription is free, and new articles are free for two months from the date I post them, a paid subscription gives you access to the full archive of over 100 articles, bonus downloads, and supports my ongoing work to share Value for Investment theory, practice, and related topics. As the archive continues to grow, so does its value - and if you take advantage of my offer now, you’ll get access to all of it, for half-price, for as long as you like.

For example, you can read about:

• Evaluative thinking: Why is it complex, and can we boil it down a bit? (Yes, we can!)

• What cost-benefit analysis, social return on investment, and VfI have in common, how they differ, and how to choose between them

• What would it look like to conduct cost-benefit studies that are inclusive, responsive, contextually viable and meaningful for people whose lives are affected?

• Other economic methods of evaluation including cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, cost-minimisation, and cost-consequence analysis and when to use them

• Evaluative reasoning in complexity, the benefits of mixed reasoning and how combining multiple viewing angles can strengthen evaluative judgements

• Different kinds of rubrics and how to choose between them for different evaluations

• Objectivity and subjectivity in evaluation, and how to push back against the misconception that rubrics and evaluative reasoning are “subjective”

• And more. Click here for a thematic directory of articles.

Ensuring value for money in government policy

In December I joined a panel to talk about value for money assessment in UK public policy. Panelists included the Head of the Evaluation Task Force, the President of the UK Evaluation Society, and Verian Group’s UK Head of Evaluation. Here’s Verian Group’s blog post on the event, which includes a link to the recorded presentation.