Advocacy and Policy Change TIG Week: An Introduction to Advocacy and Policy Change by Gavin Crowell-Williamson

Date: Sunday, November 1, 2026

Hello all, and thank you for joining the Advocacy and Policy Change (APC) TIG for our week of AEA articles! We have a series of fascinating articles inbound that frame the challenging work of evaluating advocacy efforts and policy impact.

Before diving into the content, a brief introduction: my name is Gavin Crowell-Williamson, and I’m a (very new!) incoming Co-Chair of the APC TIG. In my day-to-day I do anti-discrimination research in local government via my role at the Metro Nashville Human Relations Commission.

The APC TIG wrestles with many of the same challenges and questions as our fellow evaluators. However, unlike traditional program evaluation, which often centers on the direct outcomes of services or interventions, APC evaluation zeroes in on the strategies and dynamics behind policy influence. Because meaningful policy change can take years to materialize, evaluators in our space rely on innovative and adaptive methods to track progress and assess impact along the way. APC evaluators also bring a systems-change perspective, recognizing the complexity of policy landscapes and the ripple effects that changes can create.

We have a great series of articles forthcoming that grapple with this challenging landscape. And because I’m an evaluator at heart, I have organized the articles by the evaluation questions that they help us answer:

• How can people build power for social change?
• How do you balance the tension between the importance of voice and lived experience against the forces of power that can influence national and global institutions to act?
• What does futures literacy offer advocates, and what does advocacy capacity offer futurists?
• How do you incorporate evaluation at every stage of developing and continuously improving member-led advocacy campaigns?
• What happens when our traditional method of measurement is fundamentally flawed?
• When evaluation findings enter policy debates, do they still mean what we think they mean?

As I’m writing this post, it is the eve of the annual AEA Conference, where we will be considering important questions like these as a TIG. First, a shameless plug to attend our APC TIG meeting on 11/19 from 12:40 PM – 1:25 PM ET. Beyond that, a few sessions at the conference that have piqued my curiosity, and may be a good entry point for those thinking about policy change and evaluation are “Bridging Policy and Evaluation: Communicating Evaluation Findings to Government Decision-Makers” by Nicole Smith; “Measuring Advocacy during Volatility: An Interactive Panel Conversation”, chaired by my brilliant TIG Co-Chair Alissa Marchant; and “Evidence, Judgment, Opportunity, and Risk: Government Evaluation in an Era of Deregulation”, co-chaired by Katharina Hammler and Linda M. Kawentel.

Thanks for reading – we hope to see you at AEA or hear from you in the comments!

The American Evaluation Association is hosting APC TIG Week with our colleagues in the Advocacy and Policy Change Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our AP TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.