Evaluation Insights

Data insights for evaluation is about taking the patterns that were identified in analysis and making sense of their meaning and potential impact on the work you do. In a nutshell, evaluation insights are what you can do with the findings, as well as what it all means for your organization, industry, or field.

Every organization, business, field, program, or project can essentially be seen as an integrated and complicated system. When you collect data regarding your system, you have the potential to describe some element of its complexity. Within business, insights generally refer to findings that create some type of business value. For other sectors, insights refer to anything (knowledge) that sheds light or increases your understanding of how the system works. Actionable insights are those highly treasured findings that drive action and change.

To uncover key evaluation insights, you must have a good and detailed understanding of how your system (business, program, etc.) works. You need to be able to make direct predictions and then use data to test those predictions — does the data match your expectations? Is there anything that seems odd or doesn’t make sense? Critical insights manifest when you explore the oddities.

Questions to consider before you start looking at evaluation insights include:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• What do you expect to see?
• Are you prepared to zoom in and try to understand oddities that show up in your data?
• Who will use the insights?
• How will the insights be used?
• What will success look like?

Within each of the planning links below, we provide a definitions, how we can help you, and articles and whitepapers that will help you on your journey.