The Annual Call for AEA365 Blogs by Sheila B Robinson

Greetings aea365 readers AND authors! I’m Sheila B Robinson, Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor. Recently, I wrote this post asking what you would like to read on aea365 in 2018.

Thanks to those who offered ideas! Now, I’m writing to ask YOU to consider contributing on one of these, or any other evaluation-related topics.

Lesson Learned: Readers suggestions include:

  • How evaluators collaborate with stakeholders to apply findings of the evaluation to improving their initiative.
  • Presenting evaluation findings that are negative. How do evaluators have this conversation with their clients?
  • Strategies to help bridge evaluation with policy at various levels of implementation (e.g., organizational, community, state, federal, etc.).
  • Approaches to encourage deeper and more useful conversations about evaluation findings.
  • How to make the most of evaluator/client conversations about findings and recommendations. Ways to help prepare for those, how to organize the time, facilitating them more effectively, etc. Insights to help folks come away from these meetings with a genuine sense of “time well spent.”
  • Research on evaluation
  • Participatory methodologies, equitable evaluation, evaluation and evaluative thinking capacity-building (particularly in nonprofits), language access/justice in evaluation settings, and culturally-responsive evaluation
  • Accessible/universally-designed data collection, especially for mixed-audience groups. Not as in how-to collect data from specific audiences, but how to make data collection more inclusive overall.
  • Resources for “beginner” evaluators, overviews of guiding theories of evaluation, history of the evaluation field, subfields/types of evaluation, and important terms defined.
  • Developmental evaluation and evaluating across sectors and across agencies, with a focus on bringing together diverse interests and goals!
  • How evaluation can be used to support collective impact work.
  • Specific practices foundations are implementing to further evaluation and learning with their grantees. Commentary on power differentials as they relate to these kinds of relationships.
  • Specific techniques and practices to help give evaluation away through building evaluation capacity, instructional design, best practices in teaching of evaluation, etc.
  • SGD’s M&E system. Some kind of sharing of different countries’ experiences or perspectives from public and private sector engagement.
  • A series on managing evaluation using best practices for management such as project management principles, or management practices derived from latest developments in organizational theory and behavior.

Hot Tip: We’d love to hear from YOU!  Please send a draft for consideration.

Hot Tip: You don’t have to be an expert to contribute! Readers want to hear from everyday evaluators. You don’t need to be doing something unusual or cutting edge. Share how a strategy has worked for you. Share what you’re learning about and experimenting with. Share a lesson you’ve learned. Tell about a book you’ve read, a course you took, or an experience that gave you new insight.

Cool Trick: Follow contribution guidelines! See the link right up there…near the top of your screen? We can only publish posts that adhere to these guidelines.

Get Involved: It’s time to share YOUR insights with aea365 readers! We rely on hundreds of generous authors who have contributed over the past 8 years (!) to keep this blog going. As you can imagine, collecting 365 articles each year is no small task.

Is this the year YOU decide to contribute?

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.

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