The Art of the Nudge: Five Practices for Developmental Evaluators
Conventional program evaluation is a poor fit for the uncertain and emergent nature of innovative and complex initiatives. Developmental evaluation offers an alternative. This article offers five practices to help developmental evaluators detect and support opportunities for learning and adaptation leading to right-timed feedback.
Strategy Implementation Addressing the Disconnect between Decisions and Data: 2012 Evaluation Roundtable Convening
Drawing on benchmarking data gathered from the Evaluation Roundtable network, this presentation examines organizational barriers to learning from strategies, warns against cognitive traps that hinder learning and decision-making, and describes approaches to avoid or counteract those traps. It explores how the culture and role of evaluation in foundations can disconnect learning from strategy.
Strategic Learning in Practice: Tools to Create the Space & Structure for Learning
Evaluation that supports strategic learning applies evaluation findings as well as non-evaluation data in order to improve strategy. This brief describes practical steps for designing and using theories of change and strategic learning debriefs as tools for creating the space and structure required for strategic learning.
Evaluating Social Innovation
Common evaluation approaches and practices can constrain the kind of continuous learning and adaptation that is necessary for innovation. This brief offers lessons about an emerging evaluation approach—developmental evaluation—which supports the adaptation that is so crucial to innovation.
Evaluation of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Preschool for California’s Children Grantmaking Program
This teaching case focuses on an evaluation that aimed for real-time strategic learning over the course of a 10-year initiative. It chronicles the challenges with achieving that while the strategy shifted and evaluators grappled with how to provide information that was of real value to the work.
Advocacy Evaluation Case Study: The Chalkboard Project
An evaluation of a civic engagement and advocacy effort in Oregon offered an opportunity to incorporate both retrospective and prospective approaches and new advocacy evaluation tools. It is a case example of how evaluation can support strategic learning among advocates.
Evaluation to Support Strategic Learning: Principles and Practices
Strategic learning refers to efforts to incorporate reliable data and ongoing reflection into social change strategies. This brief digs into the definition of strategic learning. It explores how evaluation can support it, and proposes a set of principles that represent the “non-negotiables” of evaluation for strategic learning.