Evaluation that works.

Apex is a consulting and technology services company specializing in systems evaluation. We have been serving the public and nonprofit sectors for over two decades, providing program planning, evaluation, facilitation, and technical assistance, including technology for data collection and reporting.

Beginning with dual-language bilingual education grants, our portfolio has grown to include a wide range of programs, including early childhood and family programs, career pathways, community schools, and school-based health centers. The common thread: we help people and organizations use data to build, share, test, and evolve their mental models about solving wicked problems related to education, health, social, economic, and racial equity.*

We believe effective evaluation practices and use of data help our partners change systems, policies, conditions, and behaviors at the individual, community, organizational, and governmental levels.

Our Core Values

Learning

Learning is the process of building new knowledge by testing mental models in the real world. Knowledge requires both information and thinking. Learning implies action, not just an academic exercise.

Collaboration

We learn better when we share mental models. This requires trust, space, and opportunities to express conflicting viewpoints. We believe knowledge is built more effectively when there are a diversity of perspectives at the table working collaboratively.

Excellence

We set high quality and accuracy standards that encompass our evaluation cycle, including how we engage stakeholders in sharing mental models, collecting data, producing reports and effective data visualizations, and the manner in which we facilitate learning from findings and decision-making about what to do next.

Equity

We align ourselves with people, organizations, and programs that are working toward educational, health, economic, social, and racial equity. We define equitable evaluation as mindfulness of the role perspective plays in learning, including understanding how contexts, histories, and structures in society affect our partners and, therefore, our work as evaluators.

Innovation

We are not dogmatic about any particular theory or method and – unconstrained by a single methodology – we leverage the full creative capacity of our team and technologies. We are willing to test new ideas in the pursuit of breakthrough solutions for us, our partners, and the fields we serve.

Leadership

Through creative implementation of methodology and technology, we aspire to demonstrate models of evaluation that advance the field toward more effective and equitable practices.

Our Approach

We believe evaluation is a developmental, iterative, and emergent process that can benefit every organization. Whether your organization struggles to use data, has a team of data crunching wizards, or lies somewhere in between, Apex can help you use data to inform and improve your work and communicate the contributions your programs make to the world.

Our mission of learning is guided by a simple and explicit model centered on our core values and revolving in a renewable cycle:

  • sharing mental models about the work and the evaluation design, including articulating clear questions to guide our inquiry;
  • collecting credible data as evidence and context to answer those questions and stimulate other learning – using technology as feasible to maximize efficiency and effectiveness;
  • analyzing data and producing digestible reports and data visualizations to tell the story and set the stage for deep learning – again, using technology to ensure appropriate access to findings; and
  • facilitating learning that leads to action and improvement and cycling back to the next mental models to be implemented and evaluated.

This is the roadmap for the journey we take with our partners.

*If some of our language sounds like jargon, it probably is! For us, jargon is signal. Mental models are goals, plans, theories of change – any idea about how the world works and how we’d like it to work. Wicked problems are made up of complex, interacting issues evolving in dynamic social systems and contexts characterized by volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity.