Senior Consultant Deloitte Consultant, United States
Abstract Information: Establishing a community of evaluators can help improve evaluation practice through development opportunities, collaboration, and increased retention of professionals. At Deloitte Consulting, we recently refreshed an internal evaluation community, the Evaluation and Research for Action Center of Excellence (ERA CoE). The ERA CoE is a community of Deloitte practitioners interested in program evaluation, research, and supporting government practitioners to identify evidence-based practices, assess effectiveness and impact, and practice continuous quality improvement. Our goal is to create a home for and establish connections among practitioners at Deloitte who have experience and interest in supporting this type of work. We will share the story of how we revived, grew, and supported a thriving hybrid community. We welcome conversations with those interested in or currently establishing or growing an evaluation community of their own. We will share our experiences, successes, and challenges, as well as promising practices and lessons learned to grow our communities and our work as evaluation professionals. Issues such as member attrition and how to create and foster community in a hybrid environment will be addressed. No matter what point your evaluation community is at in its story, you will walk away with a few tips bookmarked.
Relevance Statement: This poster is structured around the Power of the Story. We began our work through hearing a story – a past evaluation community that was collaborative, supportive, and strong, but had fallen in recent years. We picked up our pens and began to write a sequel, re-building the evaluation community at our organization to be larger and more active than ever in the process. We want to share this story within our poster to help inspire and support others in re-writing the history of collaboration in their evaluation communities. With this, we will support several AEA End Goals, especially promoting high quality evaluation practice and professional leadership (1.1) and benefitting from professional affiliation, leadership opportunities, and inclusion within a diverse community (1.2). Spending time and resources on creating a Center of Excellence (CoE) or Community of Practice (CoP) helps build the evaluation capacity of an organization and its staff. This ties back to competency, one of AEA’s guiding principles. A CoE/CoP can provide foundational knowledge for communities as they engage in evaluation activities to ensure they have the appropriate skills and tools needed to complete the work (B1) while also facilitating connections and assistance of others when there may be gaps (B2). Additionally, CoEs/CoPs can facilitate education and training to continually foster learning around new concepts and skills and promote professional development (B4). Our poster will include information about trainings – both basic (e.g., Evaluation 101) and more technical (e.g., Power BI) – that that have helped 1) build our evaluation community and set a foundation for all practitioners in the CoE, and 2) provide specialized training to evaluators trying to grow their skillset. Additionally, our poster will highlight the benefits of a CoE/CoP in terms of offering networking and mentorship to new evaluators. Attendees will learn about steps taken to strengthen our evaluation community, and we look forward to discussing others’ stories of building, growing, and supporting their own evaluation communities.
