Ok I am going to get a little nerdy and academic with this post (sorry in advance to family & friends whose eyes are soon to glaze over). This week I am working on a monitoring and evaluation plan for a new women's self-help group training. This will eventually provide a basis for a baseline survey that I'll develop next month.
Once I created an initial draft I was asked by my supervisor to go through and remove the typical evaluation jargon before presenting it to the local NGO staff. As a total believer in meeting people and organizations where they are (and acknolwledging the history of local NGOs being left out of M&E all together) I am totally on board with this task. As with any assignment, I first turn to Google for answers -- no need to reinvent the wheel if one of the many brilliant evaluators out there in the world have already de-jargonized (is that a word?) common evaluation words and phrases. However to my surprise there are very few online resources on this topic. I am looking for less threatening/confusing words to describe:
Logic model/log frame
Indicators
Outcomes
Etc...
To give you just a sense of how jargon-filled the evaluation profession is, I came across a site that is attempting to map the typology of evaluation terms:
The image above doesn't do it justice. You can see the entire typology here: https://bubbl.us/mindmap?h=b9bc4/1a7bc4/769hviFngrfnI
I started by searching my favorite evaluation websites: Better Evaluation and the American Evaluation Association's (AEA) blog. There are several AEA blogs that mention the importance of not using jargon when writing reports for a wide audience or working with small nonprofits, but no one provided specific suggestions for how to use less jargon. It's fine and dandy that we all acknowledge the importance of not using jargon, but in my opinion if we're not providing practical examples for other organizations and our peers, we're likely not going to change the words we use.
What I have come across are some useful websites that define evaluation terms. One such website is the UK's National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement's Research and Evaluation Jargon Buster -- this would've been really helpful to me when I first started getting into evaluation. Here's another Jargon Buster website that provides examples for each term: http://www.jargonbusters.org.uk.
So, I am curious to hear from my fellow evaluators: 1) Have you come across resources with specific examples of appropriate replacement words/phrases for evaluation terms? 2) Any ideas on how I can use less jargon?? Please share in the comments below!