Hello! I am Jenica Reed, a Chair for the Health Evaluation TIG and leader within Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Evaluation and Research for Action (ERA) practice. We are hosting this week and sharing some of our favorite lessons learned, techniques for growing skillsets, tools to aid efficiency, and engagement strategies.
We value learning from colleagues and growing as a community of evaluators. At Deloitte, the ERA Center of Excellence (CoE) community started over 10 years ago and now consists of 500+ professionals with a variety of experience, expertise, and a common interest in applying evaluation and research in support of government work. Below, my colleagues share their experiences of learning and working as a community of evaluators.
Hello—our names are Grace Bachman, Gizelle Gopez, Faiza Haq, Molly Linabarger, and Leslie Otto and we are evaluators who lead Deloitte’s ERA CoE.
Our community has grown leaps and bounds over the last several years. In 2022, we prioritized internal strategic outreach, networking, and word-of-mouth of ERA. We revitalized our efforts to intentionally grow, support, and learn from our Deloitte evaluation community. We identified communities at Deloitte that were likely to have professionals interested in evaluation and research and invited their members to join our CoE. We also used our existing network to identify evaluators and encouraged them to join our community. More recently, our continued growth can be attributed to our high-quality programming such as evaluation trainings, informal learning conversations with evaluation SMEs, and our current members’ active promotion of our CoE to others. We provide professional development opportunities, targeted mentorship, and relevant resources.
In our ever increasingly hybrid world, we understand the importance of community, as well as the difficulties in maintaining connection. Our members work in 30+ cities across the country, which has required us to consciously work towards fostering a strong, connected community. Two ways we have worked towards this include planning hybrid events and regularly engaging our community in high-value activities. These include:
- All Hands Bimonthly Meetings with the ERA community where we spotlight evaluation-focused projects at Deloitte, share lessons learned, promote upcoming community building events, and hear updates from senior leaders.
- Monthly Strategy Meetings with evaluation leaders to discuss training, eminence, mentorship, and communications. We build strong community through monthly check-ins where teams bring topics for discussion and support with strategy development.
Hot Tips
We conduct an annual membership survey to determine the training needs and growth goals of our community using the results to plan our activities. We also ask members to self-report their experience with 20+ evaluation-related skills, allowing us to later match members to relevant client projects.
Community building can often be unrecognized labor. We recommend looking for opportunities to formally recognize community building efforts. For us, that has looked like regularly recognizing the work of our peers through formal and informal channels and incorporating community building into annual performance assessments.
Our goal is to create a home for and establish connections among professionals at Deloitte who have experience and interest in supporting government-related evaluation and research work. We are committed to using our voices to build the capacity of our professionals and invest in the next generation of evaluation leadership at our organization. Our established community has been so important to furthering these goals, we hope you all can find or build a community of your own to further your individual and organizational goals.
We look forward to hearing from you in the comments section about the “hot tips” and best practices for how your organization has built and grown your own evaluation community.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Health Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Health Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Health Evaluation TIGmembers. 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.