Speaking at EES: Understanding European Evaluative Perspectives

Ivanhoe Development (ID) remains focused on serving communities in the United States. However, the opportunity to learn about global evaluative perspectives is an invaluable addition to our work.

ID was invited to speak at the European Evaluation Biennial Conference in Italy this year. We presented a session entitled “Program Maturity: How Grants, Evaluation, and Design Intertwine.” It detailed our holistic approach to nonprofit development and the resource constraints that face resource-limited, community-based organizations (CBOs). Our interactions with this global community identified some evaluative barriers that exist regardless of geography. They include:

1. Evaluative Brevity: 

Survey fatigue remains an insidious issue within the evaluative space. Whether it involves asking Syrian refugees about their safety concerns or measuring economic growth from cash transfer programs in Malawi, surveys remain tedious and taxing, resulting in low data quality and transactional interactions with community members. At ID we have two standing surveying rules: 1) a survey’s length can always be cut by 20%, and 2) survey brevity respects our participant’s time and expertise. We believe that creating efficient, time-effective evaluative tools is a mechanism of respect.

2. Financial Catalysts: 

Money often drives the quality and depth of evaluation, forcing organizations to  compromise their goals or tool diversity to complete projects. Within our context, most CBOs may only spend 3-5% of their annual budget on evaluation. The solution is not to simply bemoan a smaller budget. At ID, we have a two-fold approach: 1) advocate to funders about the importance of evaluative activities and the need to provide specific funding for them, 2) create tools that can perform “double-duty” to gather quality evaluative data and also serve to support other activities as needed. 

3. Qualitative Appreciation: 

No matter where you are, numbers have historically been prized within the evaluative context. “Clear-cut” data and “more rigorous” quantitative methods have always taken center stage. While numbers do provide incredibly useful information, trends, and patterns, they do not tell the whole story. Qualitative methods such as storytelling, photovoice, and interviewing are gathering momentum (please note that these methods have been used to make decisions since the dawn of time, but within the Western context, these “tools” are relatively new) due to their low barriers to entry and freedom of expression. 

ID continues to hold to our most central value: humility. We remain lifelong learners and deeply respect our evaluation peers and clients. Our team looks forward to applying what we have learned to our everyday work. 

To check out our work, please see examples here or information about our training series here.