I’m Noemi Avalos, Senior Evaluation Officer at Sierra Health Foundation (a private health conversion foundation) and The Center (a nonprofit organization). I am a proud immigrant from Mexico and daughter of hardworking parents who worked in various agricultural fields and showed me the value of la familia (family). In this role, I lead monitoring, technical assistance, learning, and evaluation efforts in partnership with program teams, funders, and external consultants; these efforts aim to generate useful information that supports decision-making for our staff, funders, and the organizations we invest in or funded partners (grantees).
Most of our funded partners are community-based organizations serving nuestras comunidades (communities of color); they operate with reduced budgets and limited capacity for monitoring and evaluation. Because culturally responsive and equitable learning and evaluation require funded partners’ perspectives to shape the work and benefit from it, this post shares tips for meaningfully engaging partners in these efforts.
Hot Tips
| Monitoring | Evaluation | |
| Minimize burden | • Prioritize essential, actionable reporting questions and remove “nice to have” items. • Reduce reporting frequency and offer alternate reporting options such as oral or video reporting when appropriate. | • Use shorter data collection tools focused only on information that will be analyzed and used. • Align timing and methods with partners’ preferences, needs and capacity. |
| Invite partner input early | • Ask funded partners to review and provide feedback on proposed metrics before finalizing monitoring processes to confirm feasibility, relevance, and usefulness. | • Engage funded partners in selecting the external evaluation consultant (prioritizing the criteria for selection; participating in interviews). • Co-create data collection tools with partners when feasible so evaluation activities are relevant and useful. • If co-creation is not possible, ask partners to review protocols before implementation. |
| Enhance partner capacity | • Provide clear and timely reporting guidance, templates, and timelines before reports are due. • Offer office hours so partners understand requirements and to also identify challenges and potential solutions. | • Offer technical assistance through webinars, coaching, or office hours so that they can enhance their knowledge and skills in learning and evaluation that they can use beyond the grant. |
| Share data back | Share findings with funded partners and create space for sensemaking to support learning, and decision-making (for both, funders and funded partners). | |
Lessons Learned
- Usually, it is not practical to engage funded partners at every stage of the evaluation process; therefore, it is important to identify where we can prioritize their involvement.
- While the use of evaluation frameworks and terminology can be useful for evaluators, it can create confusion for funded partners or other key interest holders like program staff. Thus, it is important to spend time clarifying fuzzy language, evaluation concepts, and processes and to integrate palabras culturales (cultural terms) that might bring concepts to life.
- Being relational rather than transactional goes a long way in building confianza (trust) with funded partners. For example, making time to attend site visits or convenings to learn about their work and listen to their stories.
- Promoting equity means advocating for funded partners if needed; this can look like supporting program teams in negotiating burdensome or unrealistic reporting requirements with funders.
Rad Resources
Below are some resources that might be helpful:
- Centering Grantees With Reporting Alternatives – PEAK Grantmaking
- Embedding an Equity Focus in Evaluation
- Is my Evaluation Practice Culturally Responsive?
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