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Over the past five years, colleagues from the Centre for Development Impact (CDI) – a joint initiative between the Institute of Development Studies, Itad and University of East Anglia – have been innovating with and learning how to use Contribution Analysis as an overarching approach to impact evaluation. In this blog series, we share our learning and insights, some of them in raw emergent form, highlight the complexities, nuances, excitements, and challenges of embracing new ways of doing impact evaluation. We begin this series by sharing ideas about ‘causal hotspots’ that first surfaced as ‘aha’ moments in our collaboration on the CDI short course Contribution Analysis for Impact Evaluation – the moments when we found the ways and words to better articulate our ideas and help people navigate the messy realities of theory-based evaluation.