Short Abstract

This session will provide an opportunity to discuss key frameworks for assessing evaluation cultures within organisations and strategies to ensure progress and improvement. It will also enable discussion about what more could be done to develop an evaluation culture across the VCSE sector as a whole

Description

Our abstract will provide an opportunity to share the approaches developed and utilised by ChEW Trustee and a range of our members in their efforts to build more effective evaluation cultures

This abstract will show how organisations can assess, improve and refine the centrality of evidence in organisational culture, particularly in the VCSE. The Charties Evaluation Working Group (ChEW) have been working for several years to improve the skills, confidence and networks of evaluators in the VCSE sector. Through our work delivering events and training programmes we know that building an evaluation culture in VCSE organisations goes beyond the technical skills usually associated with evaluation.

In 2019, the UKES Good Practice Guidelines were presented and discussed with our members at one of our quarterly events, with much of the discussion focused on the guidelines for commissioners. Statements such as “are open to receiving findings that are unexpected”, “recognise that negative findings provide opportunities for learning and potential future policy or programme development” “upholding the independence of evaluation” and “preserving the integrity of findings, e.g. by not quoting or publicising findings out of context” were all recognised as important but also something that required evaluators located within commissioning organisations to be highly competent in the skills of internal influencing, negotiation, expectation management and communications.

In order to support the development of these skills, ChEW have delivered a range of activities aimed at making the most of evaluation and building evaluation cultures. This includes frameworks for understanding, assessing and taking action to establish evaluation cultures within organisations shared and refined as part of our Peer Learning Programme, as well as presentations from a number of our members on organisational impact frameworks and building evaluation cultures.

In this presentation we would share what we have learned, bringing together core frameworks for considering and advancing evaluation cultures within organisations alongside practical examples gathered from a range of our member organisations.

The session fits within theme 2 of the conference, with a specific focus on building evaluation cultures. Making use of practical examples from a range of our members and trustees, we will explore how internal evaluators can work to creating environments where evidence is valued and used and show how this can be done in a more equitable way, ensuring that power dynamics are actively considered and approaches to evaluation and evidence more generally ensure a wide range of voices are heard.

This practical session will support evaluators in understanding the common barriers and facilitators for advancing evaluation cultures within funding and delivery organisations in addition to showcasing strategies that have been successful in supporting shifts to organisational cultures that more effectively centre learning, improvement and evidence. In addition, the session will provide opportunities of how these lessons could be applied more broadly, considering how evaluation cultures could be more effectively built across the VCSE sector as a whole.