The practice is new. The methodological grounding is not.
Meridian is an early-stage evaluation practice, deliberately built as an independent vehicle. What follows is the professional experience that grounds it: the methods, the contexts, and the operational disciplines Thomas Crossman has developed across a career spanning evaluation, advisory and analytical work.
Where the brief is to measure what actually changed.
Thomas served as independent MREL advisor to an FCDO counter-terrorism programme in Somalia, inheriting a results framework that measured training attendance where it should have been measuring operational change. The task was to rebuild the evidence architecture so the programme could credibly demonstrate the institutional shifts it was actually delivering.
That work sat at the interface of FCDO accountability requirements and a team operating in one of the most constrained security environments in the world — rigorous enough for CSSF reporting standards, honest enough to capture what couldn't be measured cleanly.
Where the methods get tested.
Mid-term reviews, endline evaluations, real-time evaluations and multi-country assessments across humanitarian response, cash programming, food security, livelihoods, governance, child protection, gender, climate-migration and security sector reform — for clients including Mercy Corps, UNICEF, IOM, ACTED, UNMAS and the British Council, against FCDO, AFD, BHA, ECHO, UNTFHS, EU, KOICA and GAC frameworks.
On the qualitative side: contribution analysis, process tracing, outcome harvesting, thematic coding with inter-coder reliability, Theory of Change reconstruction. On the quantitative: reproducible Python pipelines, Kobo and ODK survey processing, indicator calculation against standard frameworks, and quasi-experimental approaches where the data supports them. Applied in access-constrained and conflict-affected settings, with enumerator training, field supervision and validation workshops.
Before the evaluations, the pipelines.
Thomas built and led a data analytics function from scratch in the private sector before moving into evaluation — team building, pipeline architecture, data quality systems, statistical modelling. That foundation now underpins the analytical infrastructure the practice runs on, and additional consultancy work has covered data systems improvement for organisations responding to gender-based violence and resource allocation modelling in education.