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Session Title: Evaluation Coaches: Designing and Evaluating for the Future
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Panel Session 309 to be held in Pacific D on Thursday, Nov 3, 11:40 AM to 12:25 PM
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Sponsored by the Non-profit and Foundations Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Charles Gasper, Missouri Foundation for Health, cgasper@mffh.org
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| Discussant(s):
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| Katrina Bledsoe, Education Development Center Inc, katrina.bledsoe@gmail.com
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| Abstract:
Evaluation Coaching is an evolved approach to evaluation derived from the sprit and lessons learned from Empowerment, Participatory, and Collaborative Evaluation. The approach directly supports the needs of nonprofits and funders to be educated and engage in evaluation. With pressures on organizations to provide results from rigorous evaluation, funders have resorted to engagement of external evaluation to assess the performance and process of their initiatives and portfolios. Internal evaluators have been tarnished with the view that their work could be tainted by their relationship with their organization.
Evaluation Coaching differs from traditional evaluation approaches as it is focused on organizational evaluation capacity building. The critical friendship between the Evaluation Coach and the organization spreads beyond one or two projects and the educational methods are highly participatory.
The presenters explain this evolutionary approach focusing on development of internal evaluation capacity, rigor of evaluation design and implementation, and use by organizations; a community-based non-profit evaluation coach will discuss the implications for the work.
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Desperately Seeking an Effective Capacity Building Model for Useful Evaluation
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| Charles Gasper, Missouri Foundation for Health, cgasper@mffh.org
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Evaluation Coaching is an evolutionary extension of Empowerment Evaluation. It is the result of over four years of work in experimenting with improving evaluation capacity in the Foundation as well as with nonprofits and uses the framework of program theory based evaluation to support the process. This presentation covers the development of Evaluation Coaching and rationale for its development, along with discussion of the process ranging from program design through evaluation. We share evidence of change in the quality of evaluation related information provided to the Foundation by its grantees as well as early evidence of expansion of evaluation use beyond the individual funded program within these grantees. Future directions and implementation of this approach to evaluation will be discussed.
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Desperately Seeking an Outcome-based Evaluation Design That has Required Rigor
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| Jack Galmiche, Nine Network of Public Media, jgalmiche@ketc.org
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To meet internal needs to understand whether a nonprofit affects change, organizations need to focus on outcomes. This presentation covers the history of the Nine Network's engagement with evaluation and its quest to develop a process that allows for organization-wide outcome assessment. We share the process of development of the "Outcomes Coach" position, its relationship with the organization as well as the work done to develop internal evaluation capacity. We also discuss the impact of implementation of an Outcomes Coaching framework on organizational program design, decision making, and assessment of outcomes tied to program and organizational improvement.
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