Program Officer Learning, Evaluation, and Research, USIP
This presentation will provide critical insights into the challenge of understanding and reporting on progress at the strategy level for a peacebuilding organization. It will begin by identifying the value and limitations of storytelling as an approach to unpacking the findings from organizational strategy-level evaluation. It will then reflect upon the relevance of storytelling as a framework for making sense of large multiyear datasets, and its effectiveness as a means for communicating key findings to a diverse audience and as a basis for organizational learning. The presentation will draw upon the monitoring and evaluation of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) strategic plan (2020-2022), which tracked progress across 17 strategic objectives. The discussion will include a summary of the evaluation methodology and the organizational challenges. Overall, the presentation will argue that storytelling is a relevant framework and effective means of communication but has limited value as a basis for learning.
