Contribution Tracing

There is increasing emphasis placed by impact evaluation commissioners on assessing the contribution made by projects and programmes to changing people’s lives, commonly referred to as a ‘contribution claim’. Current theory-based approaches fail to provide evaluators with guidance on the ‘right’ data to gather and the quality of that data in relation to a particular contribution claim. Our course solves this problem by guiding evaluators to collect data which can help assess how strongly or weakly such data support contribution claims.

Our approach is called ‘Contribution Tracing’ and we believe it is the future of impact assessment for many organisations who struggle to meaningfully impact assess their work. Our approach is inspired by the principles of Process Tracing and Bayesian updating (probability), which attempts to make these methods accessible, relevant and applicable by evaluators. Our course presents a rigorous quali-quantitative approach to establishing the validity of contribution claims in impact evaluation, with explicit criteria to guide evaluators in data collection and in measuring confidence in their findings.

The Contribution Tracing approach, aided by a symbolic ‘contribution trial’, adds value to impact evaluation theory-based approaches by reducing confirmation bias, improving the conceptual clarity and precision of theories of change, providing more transparency and predictability to data collection efforts; and ultimately increasing the internal validity and credibility of evaluation findings.