Our Principal and Associates have 20+ years of experience conducting evaluation and research projects.
We have operationalized nearly 300 projects across a variety of health and social services and are committed to building on this experience, approaching every project as an opportunity to learn, and remain open to exploring new areas where we feel our experience and skills can add value.
Our experience and skills include:
Building complex measurement plans
Our team has experience building a range of evaluation plans, from those focused on a specific program component to those capturing systems as a whole. Our evaluation plan for the BC Provincial Overdose Response, for example, was collaboratively designed to measure performance across BC at different levels of intervention (e.g. prevention, treatment and recovery) and across different sectors (e.g. government ministries, health authorities, health care providers, community/social services) and perspectives, particularly those of people with lived and living experience. We are proud to share our experience of evaluating a complex initiative through its publication in the 2019 Journal of Health Organisation and Management (JHOM).
Working with diverse stakeholder groups
Building relationships and collaborating with stakeholders is key to ensuring our evaluation plans, and findings, are appropriate, relevant and useful. Our team has significant experience working across a variety of stakeholder groups, including those involved in program planning/delivery (e.g. government officials, directors and program managers, family physicians, counsellors, teachers) and those intended to use programs/services, such as patients, clients, people with lived and living experience and whole communities, including First Nations and multicultural groups. In many of our projects we have successfully facilitated community forums as well as created, or engaged Advisory Committees comprised of different voices to guide and vet evaluation findings on an ongoing basis.
Using culturally safe and equitable methods
Our team conducts evaluation and research in a culturally safe and equitable manner by recognizing and accounting for the social and cultural power imbalances within systems and communities that lead to marginalization based on many factors (gender, race, age, sexuality, ability). Members of our team have also completed the San’yas Indigenous Cultural Safety Training through the Provincial Health Services Authority in British Columbia and are committed to sharing these learnings with our team and, when appropriate, our clients. By working with diverse stakeholders, we are also able to get input on data collection tools and methods as they are developed to ensure they will resonate with, be safe for, and useful to those we are collecting data from, particularly for marginalized populations who may have previously been previously disenfranchised in research/evaluation work.
Utilizing and managing data from multiple lines of evidence
Our team has experience implementing both qualitative and quantitative data collection tools and drawing on data sources from different stakeholder groups and regions. This helps to ensure our findings are useful to different stakeholder groups while ensuring we capture the wider context of a program/initiative. In an evaluation of the BC Provincial Overdose Response, for example, we captured the layers and complexity of the response by bringing together findings from large data sets (e.g. government ministries, health authorities, BC Centre for Disease Control, BC Centre for Substance Use), a social network analysis of Community Action Tables and from hundreds of interviews with ministry/health authority officials, health care providers and people with lived and living experience from across BC.
Communicating findings effectively
Our team has put a significant focus on ensuring that findings are presented and communicated effectively to diverse stakeholder groups. Members of our team are skilled in graphic design, providing us with the capacity to create compelling visual tools to illustrate suggested actions and how to carry out recommendations. A key professional development component for our team members includes learning to create unique data visualization tools and telling compelling stories. We have also worked with a professional author to improve our storytelling skills which has been particularly effective for sharing the outcomes of an evaluation, celebrating success and identifying areas for improvement.