Associate Professor University of South Australia, Australia
The value of an evaluation tends to be judged on its methodological rigour and usefulness to funders and their stakeholders at the point of completion. However, understanding what occurs following the completion of an evaluation is crucial to advancing the trans-discipline of evaluation, and building an evidence base for the types of practices that lead to improved social conditions, arguably the true goal of evaluation practice (Henry & Mark, 2003; Mark & Henry, 2023). Evaluation Influence exists as a framework of known and well researched social science mechanisms for influence, which offer a myriad of approaches and opportunities for understanding how individual mechanisms work and how evaluators can adapt their practice to maximise the opportunities for influence (Herbert, 2014). Drawing on direct experiences in the application of this framework following evaluations (Herbert, 2022) and reflections from other completed evaluations, this presentation will reflect on the challenges and opportunities for measuring and tracing influence and it will summarise learnings to date from the use of this framework in Research on Evaluation (RoE).
