The Experimenter's Inventory

For many practitioners in the social sector, proving theories about their work is an important part of gaining support and momentum for building strategies and the programs that support them.

To this end, The Alliance for Useful Evidence has put together “The Experimenter’s Inventory,” a catalogue of experiments for use by decision makers and professionals that sets out to answer:

• What experimentation is in policy and practice.
• What experiments can tell you about programs and their shortfalls.
• What type of experiment design works best for the type data decision makers need.

Not all practitioners - especially those working directly with the communities they wish to serve - have the skill set or capabilities to develop experiments that can be effective in returning the kind of data they need, but still need the work to be done.

The benefits of experimentation are clear. Practitioners can, on a smaller scale (and likely a lesser cost to their respective organizations), design programs based on tangible data, rather than just implement them blindly and hope for better outcomes.

The Experimenters Inventory gives us a set of repeatable experiment templates, along with use case examples that can be used to help those in the social services sector generate the data necessary to implement real change.

Project Evident's own Sara Peters served as a reviewer on this catalogue, providing the authors with insight from a policy perspective on potential uses of data and evidence building from an experimental standpoint.

Please follow this link to read the catalogue.