USAID Reflects on American Evaluation Association Conference Themes

This post was written by Melissa Patsalides from USAID's Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research in the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning.

This week at the American Evaluation Association was truly visionary (the theme of the conference). USAID staff from Washington and several missions attended to present their work, from an analysis of evaluations worldwide, to using mixed evaluation teams to build staff capacity, to experimenting with new approaches to monitoring and evaluation. This post highlights a few key takeaways from the conference, which staff from USAID's Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research in the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning, will consolidate and share more broadly in coming months.

• A theme throughout many conference sessions was that meaningful evaluation is grounded in program planning and design. The decisions made during planning and design influence whether a program is ultimately evaluable and will yield the information needed to inform decision-making and adaptive management.  Often evaluators are brought in late in program planning and implementation, when it is too late to play a facilitative role in developing the theory of change or ask the critical questions needed to ensure that a project is evaluable. There is an important, facilitative role for M&E staff to play in project design, primarily through infusing a sense of evaluative thinking into the planning and design process. 

• In addition, true development is about sustainability of results and the creation of a more equitable society. Evaluations at USAID could also take a visionary approach by answering more questions on sustainability of results, and gender equity, thus adding more value to our understanding of the long-term development impact of USAID’s interventions.

• I have been overwhelmed the number of low-cost, creative, and impactful alternatives to traditional evaluation reporting in order to increase evaluation utilization which USAID could easily adopt! We tend to rely on evaluation reports and PowerPoints as our key means of communication regardless of the audience. But given the time constraints faced by decision-makers, we could explore supplementing reports with one-pagers of infographics that highlight key findings and recommendations. To reach beneficiaries, we could place posters with illustrations of relevant findings in key communities. To generate interest among a broad population, we could send a short video with the “need-to-know” information as an email attachment, or post it to a project website. Kylie Hutchinson’s website is a wealth of information on this topic.

• I was reminded of the important role of “soft” skills for managing and conducting evaluations. These soft skills, such as negotiation and facilitation, are included in a number of versions of evaluator competencies. These soft skills can be critical to the success of the evaluation and its use. Those in the Agency tasked with building evaluation capacity might wish to include soft skills alongside technical evaluation skills when considering what full evaluation capacity looks like in USAID.