Summary

BetterEvaluation is a global community platform for evaluation knowledge, covering methods, approaches, and themes for planning, managing, conducting, and using evaluation. Its core offering is the Rainbow Framework — a seven-task structure for evaluation work — alongside curated directories of methods and academic training programmes.

Body

https://www.betterevaluation.org

BetterEvaluation operates as a global community of evaluation practitioners and researchers, sharing knowledge about how to better plan, manage, conduct and use evaluation [source: betterevaluation]. The platform organizes its content around three pillars: evaluation methods (specific techniques for data collection and analysis), evaluation approaches (overarching frameworks that guide how evaluation is conducted), and evaluation themes (cross-cutting topics like complexity, equity, and impact evaluation) [source: betterevaluation].

The Rainbow Framework is BetterEvaluation’s signature contribution: it organizes evaluation methods and processes into seven key tasks — define, frame, understand theory, describe, understand process, explain, and synthesise — providing a structured way to navigate the full evaluation cycle without prescribing a single linear path [source: betterevaluation]. This framework is particularly useful for campaigning organisations that need to adapt evaluation to non-linear advocacy contexts [source: betterevaluation].

BetterEvaluation’s thematic areas include complexity (how to evaluate programmes that operate in complex adaptive systems — relevant to campaigns whose outcomes depend on unpredictable political contexts), impact evaluation (methods for establishing causal attribution when campaigning alongside many other actors), national M&E systems (how evaluation systems are structured at country level), and M&E in fragile and conflict-affected settings [source: betterevaluation].

For campaigners, the most relevant sections are the evaluation methods catalogue (which includes demographic mapping, personal stories, and electronic democracy as methods applicable to campaign research), the empowerment evaluation approach (which provides communities and campaign teams with tools to monitor their own performance), and the Most Significant Change technique (a qualitative storytelling approach for capturing what matters most to campaign participants and stakeholders) [source: betterevaluation].

Use it for

Choosing appropriate evaluation methods for a campaigning context; understanding the Rainbow Framework as an evaluation planning map; finding alternatives to standard corporate KPIs that work for advocacy outcomes; accessing academic and practitioner evaluation literature in plain language.

Related

• campaigns-vs-movements
• citizen-lobbying
• civil-resistance
• coalition-building
• constructive-programme
• framing-and-narrative
• incidencia-politica
• pillars-of-support
• power-mapping
• spectrum-of-allies
• the-campaign-cycle
• the-tactic-star
• theory-of-change
• three-and-a-half-percent-rule

Open Questions

BetterEvaluation’s specific campaigning-adapted MEL guides (if any exist) would be the ideal primary source for the wiki’s MEL method page. The site is large; a targeted scrape of the Rainbow Framework page and the “choosing methods” guidance would yield the most useful primary text.