Manuals

Here you will find a collection of manuals, handbooks and toolkits that may be useful for think tanks. There are many more in the Evidence based Policy in Development Network.

• Learning While Doing: A 12-Step Program for Policy Change, by Lawrence MacDonald from CGD

• How to Note on Policy Influencing, by Enrique Mendizabal, RAPID for DFID.

• Advocacy tools and guidelines: promoting policy change, by Sofia Sprechmann and Emily Pelton, CARE; recommended by Nella Canales

• Evidence, messages, change: And Introductory Guide to Successful Advocacy, by Rachel Aicher, Fiona Napier, and Russell Pickard, OSI; it was forwarded to me by the RAPID Programme.

• Learners, practitioners and teachers Handbook on monitoring, evaluating and managing knowledge for policy influence, by Vanesa Weyrauch and others, CIPPEC; recommended by Enrique Mendizabal (and others through the EBPDN).

• Tax justice advocacy toolkit for civil society, by Christian Aid (lots of authors), recommended by Edward Goma from CTPD in Zambia. What I like about this toolkit is how it combines content with process -and even has information on how to do research on taxation.

• Communicating research for evidence-based policymaking -a practical guide for researchers in Socio-economic sciences and humanities. Developed by the EU it also has a website with lots of practical advice. It was recommended by the Evidence based Policy in Development Network (Africa).

• A Handbook to help researchers have impact from the London School of Economic’s Impact of Social Sciences project: It provides a large menu of sound and evidence-based advice and guidance on how to ensure that your work achieves its maximum visibility and influence with both academic and external audiences.

• A Field Communications Toolkit from COMDIS HSD by Lara Brehmer

• Eoin Young’s and Lisa Quinn’  guidebook on research based evidence advocacy

• USAID: Monitoring and Evaluation guide for health information products and services, shared by Jeff Knezovich.

• IDRC recommends a few manuals and tools for researchers that can be found in their website. They include:
  • The Communication division provides a toolkit for researchers to help employees at IDRC as well as its partners better achieve their communication objectives.
  • A Toolbox for Self-assessment: This guidebook presents an innovative and thoroughly tested model for organizational self-assessment.
  • A Framework for Improving Performance: This book offers a clear-cut methodology to diagnose institutional strengths and weakness at the onset of development activities.
  • Building learning and reflection into development programs: Outcome Mapping recognises that development is essentially about people relating to each other and their environment.
  • A Practical Guide for Research and Community-Based Organizations: This guide provides a collection of information and activities that can help development research non-profits gain financial sustainability.
  • A Guide to Collaborative Inquiry and Social Engagement: This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, facilitators and activists working with people to solve problems and support inclusive inquiry and decision-making. It will also be useful to scholars and academics studying and teaching participatory action research in the Social Sciences.
  • Bridging the Know–Do Gap: A Resource for Researchers: The Knowledge Translation Toolkit provides a thorough overview of what knowledge translation (KT) is and how to use it most effectively to bridge the “know–do” gap between research, policy, practice, and people.
  • A Guide for Researchers: This guidebook zeros in on what indigenous knowledge can contribute to a sustainable development strategy that accounts for the potential of the local environment and the experience and wisdom of the indigenous population.
  • An Interactive Guide to Effective Writing, Writing for Science, and Writing for Advocacy: In Writing for Change, you will learn the core skills of effective writing, how to write for scientific publication, and how to write for advocacy.
    
• Digital M&E tools from Nick Scott:

• To track webpage statistics, Google Analytics is pretty much the industry standard and can be installed through a small script on the site. However this doesn’t track downloads properly – for this you need to interrogate server logs. There are thousands of applications that do this, but I use Weblog Expert because it is fairly cheap and powerful enough to get what I need out of it. You can also estimate page views on a site other than your own with Google Trends and StatBrain.
• To get an overview of search engine positioning, sign up to Google Webmaster Tools.
• Organisations with RSS news feeds would do well to run them through Google Feedburner to see how they’re be used and by whom.
• Twitter statistics can be found through numerous different tools – I’ve used TwitterCounter to get some raw statistics, and Klout to get an idea of how ODI is doing in terms of influence. Klout also works with Google+, if you’re using it. If you want to see how many times a particular page has been tweeted then enter the address into Topsy and you should get a good idea.
• Facebook is easier than the rest as they offer built-in tools for analysis through Facebook Insights.
• For a simple survey of website users that is easy to install and gets key data on how people are using your website and what they think of it, I can’t recommend the free 4Q tool highly enough.
• If you don’t already have a mailing list system, MailChimp is one of the best around and allows you to do a lot of analysis of contacts.
• To track media and blog mentions Google Alerts is great – but there are also alternatives such as Social Mention.
• Academic citation analysis is hard and therefore generally very expensive, however a tool that uses Google Scholar, such as Publish or Perish, offers a lot to get on with. Note, however, that due to the nature of journal publishing processes, it takes a long time for academic citations to start coming through so this is a long-term activity.
• How you implement an M&E log is down to you. At ODI we run it through our intranet, built on Microsoft Sharepoint, but you could use a survey tool to do it, such as Survey Gizmo, or even something like a Google Docs spreadsheet with an attached form.
• Finally, organisations ready to make the leap and start bringing all of this data together in a dashboard need to think about what software or site to use to present and interrogate data. ODI uses software called Qlikview, but this is probably only for much larger organisations creating a lot of outputs every month. Online alternatives include Zoho Reports, Google Docs or Google Fusion Tables.