What is an Evaluation Culture and Why Do You Need One?
Evaluation at its core is based in learning. When evaluation processes are integrated into your work, evaluation is easier, more cost effective, more powerful in helping you do your work, and more effective in helping you communicate your impact.
Investing in building an evaluation culture in your organization can help you learn more about your work so that you can do it better and have the impact you want. Read on to learn more!
Why?
An evaluation culture will help you:
Do your work better
Make informed changes and improvements in your work
Communicate your work and its impact
Demonstrate your commitment to learning and growth
Make it easier to communicate your impact
What?
An evaluation culture is:
Proactive vs. reactive
Both externally (communicating your message) and internally (learning about your work) focused
Looks at both program activities and organizational operations
Looks at multiple aspects of an organization or program
Focused on answering questions
Focuses on the organization and its work rather than responding to outside demands
Integrated into everyday work and activities
How: Building an Evaluation Culture
Building an evaluation culture is about discovering how you are already evaluating your work, finding opportunities where you can learn more, and integrating evaluation activities into the work you’re already doing.
Discovery
How are you already evaluating? Do you consider “evaluation” in your organization? How is evaluation already incorporated into your work?
What are you already doing that you don’t realize is evaluation?
What kind of information are you already collecting that could be valuable “data?”
Finding opportunities
What questions do you have that you don’t have a system to answer or don’t know how to?
What activities are you doing that could be opportunities for data collection?
How can evaluation activities support and improve your work?
Integration
How can you make small changes that incorporate evaluation into the work you’re already doing?
How can you engage your employees, members, or participants in evaluation?
What processes can you put in place that make interpreting or understanding information/ data easier?
How can you make data and information easy to access for learning and reporting?
Who?
This all might sound like a lot of work, but having these processes in place is a true investment for organizations of any size. Investing in building an evaluation culture can help you streamline these processes so that they are a natural part of your work. You will be doing evaluation without realizing it! In fact, you probably already are, but you just might not have the language to talk about it or know how to harness the resources you have— an evaluation culture will make sure that you do!
Building an evaluation culture is about discovering how you are already evaluating your work, finding opportunities where you can learn more, and integrating evaluation activities into the work you’re already doing.
Small organizations
Without a large budget or staff, building an evaluation culture can help small orgs integrate small, easy activities that are part of the work you already do.
It will help make data collection easier and learn how you can access and use this information to improve your work and communicate it out to your community.
Large organizations
You may have the resources to hire staff or consultants dedicated to evaluation, but are these processes truly integrated into your organization?
An evaluation culture will make it easier for data and information to be used by staff at all levels (including evaluation staff!), help communicate your work, and will be powerful in demonstrating your commitment to continuous growth and learning.
