Description

This 3-hour workshop will be organized into three parts. 1) The disrupters: The first part will discuss cases where evaluation participants are derailing your data collection. Strategies for dealing with dominant personalities, emotionally-charged discussions and tangent-takers will be presented.   2) The deadbeats: The second part will explore times during data collection when respondents don’t want to participate or are hesitant to fully contribute to the evaluation. Eliciting responses from these reluctant individuals (in focus groups and interviews, for example) and stimulating survey participation will be discussed. 3) The displeased: The third and final part will discuss conflicts and other relationship issues among evaluators, between clients and consultants and with users of your evaluation. The facilitators will share advice and tools in all three of these areas. However, they will also encourage active involvement from all participants at this workshop in order to further build participants’ toolkits for addressing these types of evaluation challenges.

Facilitator(s)

Sandy Moir is a partner at Goss Gilroy Inc. and is currently the Managing Partner of the Ottawa office. She is a Credentialed Evaluator and a Certified Management Consultant. Sandy has been working in the field of evaluation and applied research for over 20 years. Over this time, she has played virtually every role possible in the conduct of an evaluation (including research assistant, junior consultant, senior consultant, project manager, sub-contractor and client). She can’t wait to hear what other evaluators have to share about the workshop topics.

Tasha Truant, a Consultant Manager at GGI, has worked in public sector research and evaluation for seven years. She spends most of her time designing and conducting evaluations, organizational reviews, and other studies which use qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to produce evidence-based conclusions and recommendations. Difficult people she has dealt with in evaluation include accusatory key informants, uninvited focus group participants, and scheming workshop participants. She is looking forward to the annual learning event, and expects to gain as much from it as the participants!