Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello fellow MEL practitioners! We are Anu Reed and Siobhan Pipoli. We currently work at Guidehouse supporting clients to develop sustainable MEL activities that produce useful data for decision-making.
Our work centers around advising MEL practitioners to develop sustainable and responsive learning organizations by interpreting and implementing the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act). We are sharing our lessons learned around common challenges monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practitioners face when reframing their evaluation infrastructures towards the Evidence Act. We have seen MEL practitioners struck with “evaluation paralysis” for a variety of reasons, including not knowing when you’ve included “enough” perspectives, how to get leadership buy-in, or how to communicate learnings efficiently and effectively. For the record, this is normal and expected – implementing the Evidence Act is complex. However, evaluation paralysis is costly, wasting time and resources.
In our series of blogs, we discuss ways to avoid common causes of evaluation paralysis. Our first lesson learned is to perform a perspective mapping exercise in the planning phase to determine who should be involved, how many perspectives to consider, and when to bring in these perspectives.
Perspectives include any entity that will be or should be involved in the evaluation at any point in its lifecycle. These perspectives willguide the effective and efficient development, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of all MEL activities within your organization.
Although it is most effective and efficient to consider the perspectives during the planning phase, it’s never too late in the process to consider involving more perspectives.
We have been asked the question, “how do you know when you have included “enough” perspectives?” There is no right number of perspectives and therefore it is difficult to know when you have included “enough” perspectives. It is unlikely that you will reach every perspective group noted in your mapping exercise, but you can strive to have a representation of perspectives from each of your buckets. These perspectives should be meaningfully involved, instead of just “checking the box” to include them.
When in doubt, don’t spin your wheels. Seek counsel. If you continue to be bogged down with these challenges, please seek us out for additional advice. (Linked-In links)
Disclaimer: Lessons learned are taken from our practical application of our projects and work.
Anu Reed, MPH – Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) Lead with 20 years of practitioner experience within the federal, state and non-profit public health, diplomacy and law-enforcement sectors. Anu leads teams to implement evaluations and evidence-building activitiesand has effectively advised agency-level leaders to plan and institute evidence-based decision-making practices, processes, and products within their organizations.
Siobhan Pipoli – Siobhan brings over eight years of experience leading Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) and change management initiatives across federal, international, and non-profit organizations, including developing MERL frameworks, learning agendas, and performance tracking tools aligned with strategic goals. She has successfully overseen MERL efforts for USG-funded grants and organizational learning strategies, ensuring compliance, engagement, and evidence-based decision-making.
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