Internal Evaluation

Hello! My name is Kate Satterfield, and I’m the Deputy Director, Evaluation and Systems Improvement at New Morning, a non-profit that promotes equitable access to contraception in South Carolina. Our flagship program began in 2017 and comprises a network of more than 70 health systems (“partners”) across the state, granted funds to improve the quality of care and provide contraceptive methods regardless of patients’ ability to pay. The program has benefitted from a comprehensive external evaluation of our activities through 2022, conducted by the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation in Women’s Health at East Tennessee State University (ETSU). Where ETSU has the capacity to empirically investigate changes in contraceptive access and use across the state, New Morning’s internal evaluation team, in partnership with technical assistance liaisons assigned to each partner—monitor processes and outputs at partner sites, working with staff to generate inquiry and inform decisions.

Hi! I’m Jodie Galosy, Ph.D., an internal evaluator at the Knowles Teacher Initiative, a nonprofit organization that supports a national network of approximately 450 mathematics and science educators in the US. Each year, we choose a cohort of about 35 beginning high school math and science teachers to participate in our five-year Teaching Fellows program that emphasizes collaborative study of teaching and teacher leadership development. Knowles Teaching Fellows who complete the five-year program become Senior Fellows who continue to participate in the Knowles community and receive support for education leadership and improvement. 

Hello! We’re Chris Lovato, Professor in the School of Population & Public Health at the University of British Columbia, and Kylie Hutchinson, independent evaluation consultant with Community Solutions Planning & Evaluation. 

Are you an internal evaluator looking to get more evaluation buy-in from senior leaders? Or do you have a manager you’d like to better educate about evaluation?

Hello! My name is Rhonda Williams, PhD., and I am the Director of Impact & Evaluation for Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas in Dallas. In this new role, I lead a small team working across the organization, focusing on the impact and evaluation of many programs and various strategic initiatives. As someone still growing in this field, I still search for tips and advice from others to improve my professional knowledge and skills. Here is an older post I developed in my first evaluation role; now, I want to add some tips for a new organization.

Hi, my name is Lenka Berkowitz (she/her) and I’m an Evaluation Manager for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a national nonprofit that works with the school community to promote healthy environments for young people. I’d like to talk to you about virtual meetings that we have in our evaluation (and other) work and what I believe can set a good meeting apart from the rest – the beginning. This is not a blog post about how to run a good meeting but about how to use the first 5-10 minutes to connect with the rest of the meeting participants and why that matters.

Hello! I’m Rafiqah Mustafaa, PhD., and I serve as the Assistant Director of Learning and Improvement at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). In this blog, I detail how our internal evaluation team (Dr. Ally Skoog-Hoffman, our Senior Director, Research and Learning, and I) has prioritized strengthening our organization’s learning culture and evaluation capacity so we can effectively conduct internal evaluation.

Welcome to the AEA365 Internal Evaluation (IE) week! I’m Boris Volkov, the IE TIG Chair, working as the Director of Monitoring & Evaluation at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and a faculty at the Institute for Health Informatics and the School of Public Health of the University of Minnesota. During this week, our evaluation colleagues from around the country will share their tips and lessons learned related to internal evaluation (IE) and beyond.

Hello! We are Rachel Sier and Morgan Buras-Finlay. In the Jobs Report released in August 2021, the US Department of Labor reported that over 4.3 million people quit their jobs or 2.9% of the American workforce, the highest number on record since December 2000. While much of this upheaval is occurring in customer service facing …

Internal Eval TIG Week: Evaluation in the Era of the “Great Resignation” by Rachel Sier and Morgan Buras-Finlay Read More »

Hi everyone, we are Amber Kraft, Melissa Schwarz, and Lindsay Zeman. We are internal evaluators at Access Community Health Network (ACCESS) in Chicago, IL. In Fall 2020, we completed an evaluation project to help program managers at ACCESS learn how the pandemic had impacted their programs. This was the first time an evaluation activity had …

Internal Eval TIG Week: Internal Evaluation as a Catalyst for Cross-Program Collaboration by Amber Kraft, Melissa Schwarz, and Lindsay Zeman Read More »

Hi! I am Andressa Gutierrez, a MEL Specialist at WorldFish, an international research institution that works on aquatic food systems. I am an international development professional with over 15 years of experience in country-, regional-, and global-level management, coordination, and monitoring development investments in agriculture and natural resources.  The CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agri-Food …

Internal Eval TIG Week: Harnessing the Value of an Online Collaborative MEL Platform by Andressa Gutierrez Read More »