Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello all, we are Karuna Chibber and Andrea Lozano from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation representing evaluators within philanthropy. And, representing external evaluators, we are Anjie Rosga from Informing Change and So O’Neil formerly from Mathematica (and now at Altarum). We’ve all worked together on different foundation projects, driven by the same values and desired outcomes – high quality, user-friendly evaluation products along with a process that centers equity. Yet, it has often seemed like we were working at odds with one another.
We decided to explore the tensions that crop up in the working model where evaluators internal to philanthropy offer TA and counsel, while external evaluators are charged with implementing independent evaluations of philanthropic investments. We arrived at 4 strategies which taken together have the potential to improve model effectiveness.
- Understand each other as people
- Understand each other’s audiences
- Understand each other’s context and offerings
- Recognize and act on shared values and needs
We shared our perspectives at AEA 2023 through an interactive poster, and further brainstormed this topic with conference attendees. We share the resulting product, with the hope that it sparks reflection and ideas for how to improve relationships between evaluators representing different perspectives.
See our table of tips for promoting collaboration and managing tensions that might crop up between internal and external evaluators.
Rad Resources
Want to get started in applying these strategies? Here are some tools to consider:
- Trust equation video
- Designing the alliance questions
- Before action review
- After action review
- Plus/delta at the end of meetings or activities together
- Collaboration Spectrum (tool to use to understand how you want to collaborate)
- RACI framework for decisions
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.