Director, Dr Ailsa Cook, has internationally recognised expertise in data and information, evaluation methods, action research, outcomes and evidence to action along with two decades of experience of working with organisations delivering complex change. Ailsa has led pioneering improvement programmes focused on bringing organisations together to develop and improve practice in focusing on outcomes at programme, personal and population levels. She has also worked extensively with policy makers to ensure a focus on outcomes is supported by policy.

Director, Dr Sarah Morton has 30 years of experience in facilitation and has pioneered using contribution analysis for this kind of work. Sarah is internationally recognised for her work developing innovative approaches to ensure that decision-makers have access to the best evidence for taking organisations, policies and practices forward. This has been through leading on knowledge exchange at the University of Edinburgh, carrying out several independent impact assessments and working alongside many organisations, teams and individual researchers to help them understand and track their impact.  Sarah has pioneered a participatory approach to using contribution analysis to understand and track impact.

Together Ailsa and Sarah have pioneered outcome-focused impact assessment through their company Matter of Focus. They have worked with hundreds of organisations, from the public and third sectors to help them set out theories of change, use data and evidence well, embed evaluation and report in an outcome and impact-focused way. They have done this through building a team of consultants and developing an innovative software tool OutNav that helps organisations embed outcome evaluation into their work.

Claudia Ibarguen is a highly accomplished evaluation professional with over 15 years of experience in the United Nations system, specialising in advancing evidence-based decision-making and global development. Currently, she serves as Vice Chair of the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG), promoting high-quality evaluation practices across UN agencies.

For the past five years, Claudia has been the Head of Evaluation at UNESCO in Paris, where she leads evaluations of large corporate programmes and strategic issues. She also supports decentralised evaluations of projects implemented across UNESCO’s 54+ field offices. Prior to this, she spent five years as a Senior Evaluator in the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) at the UN Secretariat in New York, focusing on the relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency of UN programmes and management systems.

Claudia’s earlier roles include five years with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, where she coordinated a project on impact evaluation of child labor elimination initiatives. She has also worked as an independent evaluation consultant, focusing on development projects in Latin America, and spent four years at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) in Sri Lanka, addressing poverty-related development challenges.

Her academic journey reflects her deep commitment to international studies and development. Claudia holds a Master’s in Law and Diplomacy and International Studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University) in the United States, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), where she also spent time lectureing on International Relations.