Short Abstract

In recent years , evaluation quality has improved but evaluation directors still lament the limited use of evaluation results. This presentation considers one of the main reasons this gap persists; our collective failure to read the organisational environment and influence key decision makers.

Description

We don't know how much taxpayer funding goes to the evaluation of international development and humanitarian evaluation, but it is comfortably over US$100 million a year. Some of this investment is wasted but we don't know how much; 20%, 30%? In any scenario, it’s millions of USD/GBP.

We’ve been asking for a long time why some evaluations catalyse change while others gather dust on the shelf. In response, in the last 25 years we have made real progress in the professionalisation of evaluation including the development of norms, standards, methods, ethics and in the communication of results. We’ve become better at engaging stakeholders before we complete evaluation reports.

Overall, evaluation quality has gone up. Why then, do evaluation directors still lament the limited uptake of evaluation results by their organisations and the managers most concerned? It appears that the gap between technically sound evaluation and genuine uptake of evaluation results remains frustratingly wide.

In this brief presentation, we will talk about one of the main reasons this gap persists; our collective failure to properly read the political and organisational environment around each evaluation and to influence the key individuals who decide if and how evaluation results are used.

Certainly, this requires skill and because we cannot control the outcome of these interactions, which means there are no guarantees of success. However, we can learn from experience.

In this session, we will cover a few key points concerning how to influence, using practical examples:

• Why high quality in evaluation takes away reasons for not using evaluations but, by itself, cannot not drive utilisation.

• The importance of shaping organisational connections and fitting evaluations into organisational decision-making

• Understanding managers perspectives; how evaluations interact with clients’ decision-making in light of the incentives, opportunities and risks they see in evaluation

• Building trust and credibility in the evaluation with clients through listening, impartiality and competence

• Allowing stakeholders to debate results and agree actions in the evaluation while maintaining the integrity of the evaluation process.

• Closing out the evaluation; managing the critical, high-risk transition from evaluation completion to organisational action

Some evaluation directors still think that influencing is not the business of evaluators and evaluation managers: ‘Deliver good evaluations and leave the rest to management’, they say. This presentation will discuss why this is a mistake and why learning how to influence the environment around any evaluation is critical to delivering on the conference theme of ‘Bridging the Bap: Evaluation into Action’.