Past Issues

LaRED TIG Week: Supporting Funded Partners With Monitoring or Evaluation Efforts by Noemi Avalos

Date: Sunday, September 20, 2026

I’m Noemi Avalos, Senior Evaluation Officer at Sierra Health Foundation (a private health conservation foundation) and The Center (a nonprofit organization). I am a proud immigrant from Mexico and daughter of hardworking parents who worked in various agricultural fields and showed me the value of la familia (family). In this role, I lead monitoring, technical assistance, learning, and evaluation efforts in partnership with program teams, funders, and external consultants; these efforts aim to generate useful information that supports decision-making for our staff, funders, and the organizations we invest in or funded partners (grantees).

Most of our funded partners are community-based organizations serving nuestras comunidades (communities of color); they operate with reduced budgets and limited capacity for monitoring and evaluation. Because culturally responsive and equitable learning and evaluation require funded partners’ perspectives to shape the work and benefit from it, this post shares tips for meaningfully engaging partners in these efforts.

Hot Tips

	Monitoring	Evaluation
Minimize burden	• Prioritize essential, actionable reporting questions and remove “nice to have” items. • Reduce reporting frequency and offer alternate reporting options such as oral or video reporting when appropriate.	• Use shorter data collection tools focused only on information that will be analyzed and used. • Align timing and methods with partners’ preferences, needs and capacity.
Invite partner input early	• Ask funded partners to review and provide feedback on proposed metrics before finalizing monitoring processes to confirm feasibility, relevance, and usefulness.	• Engage funded partners in selecting the external evaluation consultant (prioritizing the criteria for selection; participating in interviews). • Co-create data collection tools with partners when feasible so evaluation activities are relevant and useful. • If co-creation is not possible, ask partners to review protocols before implementation.
Enhance partner capacity	• Provide clear and timely reporting guidance, templates, and timelines before reports are due. • Offer office hours so partners understand requirements and to also identify challenges and potential solutions.	• Offer technical assistance through webinars, coaching, or office hours so that they can enhance their knowledge and skills in learning and evaluation that they can use beyond the grant.
Share data back	Share findings with funded partners and create space for sensemaking to support learning, and decision-making (for both, funders and funded partners).

Lessons Learned

Usually, it is not practical to engage funded partners at every stage of the evaluation process; therefore, it is important to identify where we can prioritize their involvement.

While the use of evaluation frameworks and terminology can be useful for evaluators, it can create confusion for funded partners or other key interest holders like program staff. Thus, it is important to spend time clarifying fuzzy language, evaluation concepts, and processes and to integrate palabras culturales (cultural terms) that might bring concepts to life.

Being relational rather than transactional goes a long way in building confianza (trust) with funded partners. For example, making time to attend site visits or convenings to learn about their work and listen to their stories.

Promoting equity means advocating for funded partners if needed; this can look like supporting program teams in negotiating burdensome or unrealistic reporting requirements with funders.

Rad Resources

Below are some resources that might be helpful:

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Latina/o Responsive Evaluation Discourse TIG Week. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from LaRED Topical Interest Group 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.