Government Evaluation TIG Week: Lessons from Establishing San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance, and Analytics, by Katharina Hammler and Ricardo Basurto-Dávila

Date: Monday, June 30, 2025

Hello! We are Katharina Hammler (Performance & Evaluation Branch Manager) and Ricardo Basurto-Dávila (Chief Evaluation Officer) from the County of San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance, and Analytics (OEPA). Established in 2021, OEPA is one of the first of its kind in local government. In this post, we share highlights and lessons from our first few years of existence.

OEPA was created by the County’s Board of Supervisors to promote evidence-based policymaking. Our responsibilities include providing leadership, coordination, and capacity-building around evidence-based policymaking, program evaluation, data sharing, data collection, and metrics.

Lessons Learned

• Strategic prioritization adds value: An Annual Strategic Research Plan (ASRP) is an effective tool for strategic decision making and building support and engagement across the organization. The core of the ASRP is the Learning Agenda, which outlines key questions designed to address long-term, high-priority issues and guide the County’s evaluation efforts over the next two to five years. Our ASRP cycle has four phases that prioritize engagement with other County departments and the public (see graphic below). This way, the ASRP becomes a communication tool for inside and outside audiences and helps us focus our efforts on questions that matter to our stakeholders.

• Capacity building needs to respond to the organizational context: Training on evaluation and evidence-building must connect to daily work needs. We iterate on our capacity building efforts and developed a curriculum that shows how evaluative thinking can be integrated in all aspects of policy making and programming, highlighting connections to County staff’s ongoing work, and guiding them to build strong evaluation projects step-by-step (see our framework pyramid below).

• Help others understand your work and provide frameworks and templates that are useful for non-evaluators: Most evaluators know how difficult it can be to describe our work but it is time well invested. We also provide tangible tools and templates to help programmatic team members engage with evaluation. Curating and editing materials for local use adds value.
• Communicate your progress: A lot of evaluation projects have comparatively long timelines. Designing evaluations to communicate preliminary results along the way makes the work more useful to decision-makers and demonstrates value. 
• Know your audiences: As government evaluators, we need to communicate to a range of different audiences, for instance political and administrative leaders, the public, and the academic community. Each of these have very different needs. Thinking early and strategically about how to disseminate results is crucial.
• Build a shared language: Building a shared language facilitates a culture of learning. Different parts of the County have been using different terms for similar concepts, so we have put emphasis on creating a common language.
• Be a partner and build relationships: Building relationships and understanding pain points at various organizational levels helps create strong partnerships for evaluation and reduces the risk of evaluative activities being seen as punitive.
• Keep mission-driven staff engaged: Navigating bureaucratic and political landscapes can be challenging for our staff, especially coming out of academia or related fields. We have created spaces for open communication and intellectual engagement outside of specific projects to help keep staff motivated. 

Rad Resources

Fortunately, there are a lot of great resources available to help those working to bring evaluative thinking to local governments. A few resources that we have found useful include:

• J-PAL provides many resources, including the Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) program.
• Results for America has many great resources for local policymakers, including guidance around creating evaluation policies, communities of practice, and sprints that help local policymakers tackle challenges.
• The Data Foundation provides a range of rad resources around the Evidence Act (and many related topics).

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Gov’t Eval TIG Week with our colleagues in the Government Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Gov’t Eval 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 send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. 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.