Date: Friday, October 9, 2026
Hello! I’m Julianne Lee, an evaluation manager who has worked across several public sectors (academia, state/federal government, non-profits) before landing in Washington, DC. While I earned a doctorate in evaluation in 2007, my reflective practice strengthened from real life applications in education, health, public health, and transportation, on the ground and in collaborative conversations with interest holders.
Which kinds of conversations? There are two I’d like to focus on here, as they are both related to the competency of evaluation management. They involve managing expectations while upholding program interests: 1) evaluation planning and 2) evaluation usage.
According to the AEA Evaluator Competencies, the evaluator ‘Plans for evaluation use and influence’ in the domain ‘Planning & Management.’ Consider the following scenario:
A federal agency receives a Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendation to evaluate its three community-based education grant programs in diabetes management for evidence of effectiveness around their common outcomes of healthcare access, lifestyle changes, and weight reduction. The agency has a small evaluation team of two experienced evaluators. The team is also charged with ongoing performance management at the agency. While the agency benefits from in-house skill sets for program evaluation, they are often stretched by competing demands.
To begin answering GAO, the evaluators set up initial meetings with program staff to get the planning process going- this will include generating evaluation questions, creating program logic models, identifying data sources and analytic plans to satisfy the requirements. These meetings are less than productive; program staff are confused as to why an evaluation is necessary, when they report on administrative data on the number of grant awards and community agencies who receive those awards to headquarters. They know the programs are achieving outcomes, they say, because recipients state they will achieve health outcomes in their applications.
The seasoned evaluation team with competency in evaluation management creates an evaluation plan with the intention of not just meeting the current requirement for outcomes evaluation, but generating results that lead to agency action and program-level decision making.
People ask me, how do you know when an evaluation is successful? For me, it’s all about whether the program and/or others in the organization use the findings for decision making or change.
Regardless of whether you work in a non-profit, state government, or federal agency, encourage program partners to help you build the logic model that goes into the evaluation plan or otherwise expresses the program’s theory of action. Be prepared to tap into your facilitation competency for this, since most of the time you’ll need to explain the model’s components, such as the difference between outputs (evidence of activities being implemented) and outcomes (changes or benefits) or the range of inputs (financial, legislative, personnel, etc.) to be included. You’ll pick up preferences for evaluation questions through this iterative process, increasing the likelihood the evaluation will generate results they’re interested in acting upon.
Be a critical friend to the evaluand’s staff and partners in generating the EQs that are both required and desired. Ask ‘what questions do you want to answer?’ One person is interested in who in the community is applying training content and another wants to zero in on the financial resources required to sustain healthcare access among grant recipients. Working through the most feasible EQs given the data availability and resourcing will foster internal organizational evaluation use after the formal reports are done and the requestor (who may be external to the program’s host setting) is satisfied.
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