We used crowd-sourcing for this week’s #EvalTuesdayTip! Thanks to Amanda Jitsing, director of DNA Economics for providing a guest tip.

At some point in the evaluation process, an evaluator engages stakeholders to understand their expectations, validate the findings and agree on recommendations.  Audience response systems, like Mentimeter, are a great way to engage stakeholders during these interactions. Mentimeter works especially well in larger audiences, giving everyone a chance to provide their input into the evaluation.

Responses are anonymous, which means that evaluation stakeholders can give you their honest opinions without fear or favour.

In some ways, audience response systems bring balance to these workshops, giving less vocal participants the opportunity to have a say in the evaluation.

As an interactive polling system, Mentimeter gives you almost instant results. All participants must do is visit www.menti.com and enter a six-digit code in their smartphone, tablet, or computer and vote.

How can you use Mentimeter during an evaluation?

1. Inception meeting: You can use Mentimeter during the inception meeting asking stakeholders to articulate their expectations of the evaluation. You can also use Mentimeter to test whether the audience shares a common understanding of the purpose of the evaluation.
2. Theory of Change: An audience response system is especially helpful in the Theory of Change (ToC) workshops. It can be used to check if the audience understands why we create a ToC for an evaluation. Once you have the ToC, you can also ask stakeholders if they agree in principle with the final version. Mentimeter can also poll audiences to ascertain whether evaluators are asking the right evaluation questions.
3. Validation workshop: Presenting the findings of an evaluation to a large audience can be quite challenging. Mentimeter can turn evaluation validation workshops into interactive sessions where stakeholders can actively engage with the findings and recommendations. For instance, you can ask stakeholders to rank the recommendations in order of their relative importance. Of course, each stakeholder will assign different levels of priority to recommendations. But, as Mentimeter averages the ranked scores, the final results show the relative importance of each recommendation to the programme’s stakeholders. For evaluators, this type of information might help you sequence the recommendations in your final evaluation report.

Like all good apps nowadays, Mentimeter is extremely intuitive. There is a free version that allows you to develop a limited number of presentations and slides.

If you are interested, sign up for the free version at https://www.mentimeter.com/. I’ve created a little video embedded in the Powerpoint Slide below to show you how the Mentimeter interface looks. I’ve also recorded two examples of how Mentimeter is used in evaluations. To view the video, open the Powerpoint Slide, and click the play button at the bottom left-hand corner.