2 - Building Evaluation Capacity in Organizations

Abstract Information: Evaluation capacity building (ECB) continues to be an important component of the professional practice of evaluation. Over the past two decades there has been a consistent and growing literature base on the topic, and within the federal government recent mandates associated with the Evidence Act have created an important demand for assessing and building evaluation capacity within a majority of government agencies. Despite the importance of ECB in our field, there are few, to no, trainings on this topic. This workshop aims to fill this gap. Attendees will be introduced to the fundamentals of ECB; the intended long-, mid-, and short-term outcomes of ECB interventions; a range of ECB interventions; and tools and techniques for measuring evaluation capacity in organizations. Throughout the workshop, participants will use their newly-acquired knowledge and logic modeling skills to design an ECB intervention for an organization. Participants will also engage in a series of reflective exercises to examine which evaluation capacity builder competencies they are strong in, where they need further development, and will put into place a personal professional development plan for enhancing their skill-set in the upcoming three years. It is anticipated that attendees will be well-positioned at the end of the workshop to implement the intervention they design upon their return to the office and enacting their personal development plans.

Relevance Statement: Evaluation capacity building (ECB), known as “the intentional work to continuously create and sustain overall organizational processes that make quality evaluation and its uses routine,” (Stockdill, Baizerman, & Compton, 2002, p. 14) continues to be an important component of the professional practice of evaluation. Over the past two decades, there has been a consistent and growing literature base within evaluation journals on the topic – with 160 ECB-specific articles published between 2000 and 2019, most of which share lessons learned from implementing ECB interventions in the field (Bourgeois, Lemire, Fierro, Castleman, & Cho, 2022). ECB has received additional, recent, attention within the U.S. government context – the Evidence Act of 2019 included a requirement that federal agencies within its purview conduct an assessment of their evaluation (and related) capacity. Almost all federal agencies covered under the act have now completed this assessment and are in the midst of considering how to enhance their existing capacity.

The consistent interest in ECB over the past two decades, and the pressing need to respond to the calls for building evaluation capacity within the federal government, raises important questions about how prepared evaluators are to engage in ECB efforts and what training they receive for engaging in this important task. In our experience, we have seen few to no trainings on this topic within the professional development and formal academic offerings in our field. These on-the-ground observations are supported by a recent review conducted in 2021 by Minji Cho at Claremont Graduate University who found that educational institutions offering professional development on evaluation offered very few trainings specifically on ECB. The current gap in training on ECB, coupled with findings from recent studies that suggest competencies for professionals tasked with building evaluation capacity in organizations may differ in important, and meaningful, ways from evaluators more generally (Buetti, Bourgeois, & Jafary, 2023; Castleman, 2021) indicate a need for a professional development workshop on this topic.

Building on a workshop previously offered through The Evaluators Institute (TEI) from 2018-2020, we plan to engage with attendees to enhance their skills to design ECB interventions and identify areas for continued growth and development as an evaluation capacity builder. Attendees will be introduced to the fundamentals of ECB; the intended long-, mid-, and short-term outcomes of ECB interventions (Fierro & Christie, 2017); a range of ECB interventions (Bourgeois et al., 2022); and tools and techniques for measuring evaluation capacity in organizations. Throughout the workshop, participants will use their newly-acquired knowledge and logic modeling skills to design an ECB intervention for an organization. Participants will also engage in a series of reflective exercises to examine which evaluation capacity builder competencies they are strong in, where they need further development, and will put into place a personal professional development plan for enhancing their skill-set in the upcoming three years. It is anticipated that attendees will be well-positioned at the end of the workshop to implement the intervention they design upon their return to the office and enacting their personal development plans.