Looking back, moving forward
The first two years of Evaluation and Value for Investment on Substack + what's coming up next
By the numbers
🍰This publication is 2 years old! I posted my first Substack article on 5 January, 2023.
📚Since then I’ve shared a total of 109 articles about aspects of the Value for Investment approach, evaluative reasoning and rubrics, expanding program theory with value propositions, exploring economic methods of evaluation, adding Cubist Evaluation to our quiver of approaches, and various other topics.
🙋Counting outputs is OK, I guess. But were my outputs worthwhile? My aim is to write articles that are interesting, useful, and fun. I rely on your feedback to evaluate that.
👍I do take some encouragement from the steady growth in readership, now over 1,200 subscribers. Huge thanks to all of you!
🚀Collectively, my articles were read 79,000 times in 2024 (up from 51,000 in 2023). Can I claim readership as an outcome? Maybe. Just. It’s a measure of something other people did with my outputs after I delivered them, but it doesn’t tell me if I’ve made a difference, if I’m disrupting value for money assessment.
🌍The real impact happens if you use the ideas in your work to help people make good resource allocation decisions. I’m tracking the use of the VfI approach on my VfI landing page, and encourage your ongoing feedback to help keep me up to date on where it’s being used and how it’s going.
Here’s a quick look back at five articles from last year. Generally, new articles are free for two months and then go into the archive for paid subscribers, but I’ve unlocked these ones…
Most-read article in 2024
In NZ last year there was a lot of curiosity (and perhaps a little anxiety) about the government’s social investment approach. This post, which reached 1,880 readers, reported on a panel discussion addressing the questions: How do we determine “value” and who gets to decide? What kinds of evidence can we use to determine and measure different forms of value?
By weaving together stories and data, we can create a powerful force for change. Stories provide the heart, the human connection, and the inspiration. Data provides the evidence, the accountability, and the direction. Together, they create a compelling narrative that can move mountains. They can inspire funders, policymakers, and communities to work together to create a brighter future for our whānau. It's about recognising that both qualitative and quantitative information are valuable tools in our journey towards a more just and equitable society. (Atawhai Tibble)
Least-read article in 2024
Sometimes I go off-piste and write about things that are tangential to VfI (though only slightly; bike paths are a worthwhile resource investment, creating significant social, environmental and economic value). Thank you to the 258 readers who took an interest. It’s here if you want to show it a bit of love…
Three personal favourites from 2024
The following article was inspired by a passing comment from an evaluator friend who referred to evaluative reasoning as a “judgement-making tool”. I always welcome your questions and comments, and sometimes you inspire me to write...
I enjoyed writing the following with Adrian Field and hope it made a difference for colleagues contemplating the possibility of starting their own businesses in the wake of NZ public sector job losses…
John Gargani and I had an article published in Evaluation, building on our presentation at the European Evaluation Society’s Copenhagen conference. I followed it up with this Substack post, summarising our key points…
Coming up this year
I’m currently on holiday and my January Substack posts are looking back at some of the ground we’ve covered so far. I’ll be back in February with more new material. Here are some of the topics I have in mind for 2025:
Evaluative reasoning and rubric-related topics: practical tips for evaluative sense-making; strategies for setting standards; how to make an early investment in rubrics pay back in every subsequent step of an evaluation from methods selection through to reporting.
Theory-based VfI: exploring different value creation mechanisms and how making them explicit can strengthen evaluations.
Economic methods of evaluation: assessing cost-effectiveness when all you have is outputs or short-term outcomes data; CBA and the mirage of “objectivity”; financial and fiscal CBA demystified; the time value of money.
And more.
I’m also planning to revisit a few themes: Last year I experimented with a series of short reads, boiling down key points from earlier articles into digestible bites. I received positive feedback on these short reads and will continue them this year. These revisited topics won’t be copy-and-paste re-runs - they’ll be carefully re-written updates with the aim of sharing important VfI concepts with new subscribers and offering longstanding subscribers new angles on key topics.
Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover…
Stay tuned!
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I love hearing from you
💬 I joined Substack with the hope of starting conversations. Thanks to all who have emailed or engaged in the comments section over the last two years. Your comments and questions help me to refine my thinking. I feel encouraged to keep writing when you tell me how something I shared helped you in your work. It feeds my soul when you leave me a ❤️! On the other hand, if you disagree with something I’ve said, challenge me. And if I’m not quite making sense, speaking in Yoda-esque riddles, or rambling incoherently, be a friend and let me know!
☎️ Get in touch if you’d like to find out about training, mentoring, joining forces to tackle a project together, or developing your organisation’s evaluation systems and capabilities.