A Developmental Evaluation Companion Now Available for Pre-Order

For over a decade, developmental evaluation has been useful for innovators trying to make a positive change in the world.

 

Developmental evaluation helps track the progress and effectiveness of social change approaches, and not merely for the purpose of answering the question, how are we doing? It also provides guidance in answering questions like what can we do differently? What should we try next? It can also help in situations where an approach to a problem has not yet been ventured and is still in the ideation stage.

The McConnell Foundation published A Developmental Evaluation Primer in 2008. It has become the most downloaded resource on our website, has been cited in academic literature over 200 times, and translated into French and Japanese. As Canada and the world enter an era of even greater complexity and urgency, we hope that the forthcoming release of the follow-up publication, A Developmental Evaluation Companion, will be just as helpful. As the authors Jamie Gamble, Kate McKegg and Mark Cabaj note in the introduction, “Supporting adaptation in the face of complexity is the purpose of DE.” 

The authors articulate how complex and far-reaching problems are sought to be solved, in contexts such as social innovation. Think of poverty, social inequality, racial injustice – everything that the pandemic has brought to light, they write.

For those involved or interested in social innovation, this book will help you acquire necessary DE tools to map out the path, as you go along, of exploratory stages of innovation. The Companion provides an understanding of the usefulness of DE, through concrete experiences and a decade of practice. It offers methods and advice for which DE can be applied for innovative or transformative projects.

A Developmental Evaluation Companion will be available this spring. It is available for pre-order through the form below. Note that the PDF will be emailed to readers for download in English and French as soon as it becomes available; a print version will be produced if there is sufficient demand.  If you would like to pre-order more than 10 print copies, please don’t use the form below but instead email us at communications@mcconnellfoundation.ca with full details of your organizational needs and intended purpose. At this point we cannot guarantee a print-run that would enable us to satisfy such requests but we will keep you informed about the progress of this project.

Pre-order your copy