Training
Trainings
At Spark, we offer a plethora of training workshops throughout the year for interested research students, staff, and faculty. Please refer to this page to get the most up-to-date information about training workshops.
Impact Evaluation Short Course
Social purpose organizations are facing increased demand and, often, fewer resources. They regularly need to convince funders that their efforts effectively advance the desired social impacts. Impact evaluation provides the evidence that funders seek while helping organizations improve their effectiveness.
Instructor: Paul Bakker, Credentialed Evaluator
Dates: Tuesdays in Fall 2023 (Sept 19th, 26th, Oct 3rd, 7th and 24th)
Time: 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Online
Price: $550 (HST included)
Social purpose organizations are facing increased demand and, often, fewer resources. They regularly need to convince funders that their efforts effectively advance the desired social impacts. Impact evaluation provides the evidence that funders seek while helping organizations improve their effectiveness.
In this workshop, we will dig in to when and how to conduct an impact evaluation. By the end, you will be better able to define and answer questions about lasting changes emerging from an initiative (overall, diverging across elements of an initiative, in different contexts and with different groups of people). We will review the fundamental concepts of evaluation and then delve more deeply into impact evaluation questions, discussing various ways to accurately measure impact and considerations specific to this type of evaluation.
Limited to 30 participants.
Registration for this course is now closed - if you want some insight into the material Paul provides, you can watch his Spark Talk on Impact Evaluation below:
Your bespoke training needs are just an email away.
In addition to our scheduled workshops, Spark kindles the spirit of collaboration and growth through custom training sessions. These are meticulously designed to meet the unique needs of your research teams or supplement the learning experience in your classrooms.
Our team offers custom trainings for research teams and will deliver short presentations to classes upon request. If you would like to take advantage of these opportunities, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Interested in other trainings?
If you are unable to find a workshop that suits your needs, other institutions provide trainings to teach different scientific methods. Here is a list of the other opportunities that are not based in Spark:
- Institute for Social Research (University of Michigan)
- Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (University of North Carolina)
- Social Research Centre (Ontario Tech University)
- Institute for Social Research (York University)
Anything missing? We want to hear from you!
In an effort to curate informational workshops which directly benefit you, we have the following survey to collect your feedback. Your participation in this survey is confidential and will strictly be used to help us improve the workshops that we provide.