New Directions for Evaluation (NDE) Week: You Shared; We Listened! Feedback from 2024 Listening Sessions on New Directions for Evaluation by Amanda Sutter

Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Greetings! I am Amanda Sutter—longtime evaluator, evaluation doctoral student, and a Junior Editor who has had the pleasure of serving the journal New Directions for Evaluation (NDE) since early 2024. As part of a larger effort to promote inclusion in evaluation publishing, I spearheaded listening sessions in summer 2024. Our entire NDE journal editorial team would like to thank all evaluators who joined us for these conversations! Your time and thoughtful input was sincerely appreciated, and on behalf of the team, I am happy to share with everyone here what we learned.

Evaluators offered a wealth of ideas about the future of NDE, as presented fully in this summary report. Participants were primarily practitioners who had not previously published in or read NDE. When asked who NDE should target, they overwhelmingly believed the journal should focus on practitioners, but they differentiated readers from contributors because they believed academics may have the necessary time and resources to be writers or editors.

Listening session attendees offered ideas for potential topics, suggestions on how to make NDE more inclusive, and strategies for encouraging new authors/editors to participate with NDE. Because all NDE publications are special issues, issue topics that were most frequently desired were related to: culturally responsive evaluation, methodological issues, and systems or complexity.  

NDE believes the evaluation field benefits from diverse voices in publishing and broadening representation with more practitioner voices. To make NDE more inclusive and accessible for new authors or editors, key suggestions focused on outreach/communications, resource guides, training/coaching supports, ways to foster connections, and operational changes to facilitate broader engagement with the journal. The NDE editor team knew more transparency and information on the “how-to” of publishing was needed, but we were blown away by the diversity of ideas to support both building skills and relationships that are essential to be successful.

The ideas from these conversations were used as the foundation for a new initiative, as described in our post on our new INVitE-Pub initiative, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We could not have done it without you, evaluators! Here are some lessons learned, hot tips, and rad resources for your own needs assessment efforts.

Lessons Learned

• As evaluators, we know we always benefit from listening. Be careful not to jump to conclusions on what people need before you ask them—you’ll likely be surprised!
• In delivery of the sessions, we were reminded not to assume everyone knows the larger context. Always explain acronyms and define terms being discussed.
• Evaluation capacity building (ECB) lessons apply for evaluators too—people need a variety of supports including direct & indirect and individual & organizational. To build evaluator skills in publishing, many strategies are needed, including resources, training & technical assistance, relationship building, and more.

Hot Tips

• For virtual needs assessments, use online whiteboards to make data collection and analysis easy. We used Jamboard (which has sunsetted), but there are many alternatives: Miro, FigJam, Lucidspark, and Microsoft Whiteboard.
• When analyzing findings, report on both top themes and an “action idea bank” that lists all actionable ideas your team can use to plan next steps based on the needs assessment.
• Consider using an action priority matrix to facilitate planning within your team, making sure to account for the effort and impact of various strategies from your action idea bank.

Rad Resources

• Explore this peer-reviewed piece on taking a transformative approach to needs assessment.
• Check out needs assessment information throughout AEA365. 
• Read more on doing needs assessments with this comprehensive kit. 

The American Evaluation Association is hosting New Directions for Evaluation (NDE). The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from the NDE team. 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.