2021 Conference Theme: Good Enough Evidence for Social Good
Faced with both external pressure and internal ambition to achieve greater social impact, non-profit organisations increasingly engage in evaluation and conduct research to collect evidence that informs their programmes or organizational strategy. However, there is a wide variety of research activities possible, and these can range from basic research typically conducted by academics to the many forms of applied research used for different purposes: needs assessments to understand the problem; evidence reviews or design research to develop a solution; and evaluation to determine how effective those solutions were. There are also disputes about who are best positioned to conduct what kinds of research — whether research should be done by specialists in academia or research firms, or whether they could be conducted by practitioners or even communities and clients themselves (i.e., practice and participatory research).
This conference will help answer the following questions: How can non-profits meaningfully evaluate outcomes and is it possible to coherently aggregate diverse programme outcomes to broader social impact? What are the virtues and limits of evidence-based practice? What is the value of different types of evaluation and research for various non-profit actors?