Continuous Progress: Web-Based Guides to Planning Advocacy Evaluation from the Aspen Institute’s Global Interdependence Initiative

by David Devlin-Foltz,  Director, Global Interdependence Initiative, The Aspen Institute

Continuous Progress is a set of practical, web-based guides to help donors and advocates work together to plan, evaluate, learn from and improve their foreign policy advocacy efforts. Created by the Aspen Institute’s Global Interdependence Initiative (GII), these guides focus on the challenge of evaluating advocacy concerning global issues like fighting infectious diseases or promoting fairer trade.  Many of the concepts and tips in the guides, however, can help funders and nonprofits addressing domestic issues as well.

The guides aim to help grantmakers and advocates come to a common understanding of their goals, “theory of change,” benchmarks and indicators for both policy change and for advocacy capacity within the grantee organizations.  And–as the title suggests–the complementary online guides for advocates and grantmakers emphasize continuous evaluation as the basis for learning and improvement throughout the life of the project. 

GII commissioned Edith Asibey and Justin van Fleet to build on what GII had heard from foreign policy advocates, communications strategists, private sector advertisers and grantmakers in two years of meetings with their Evaluation Learning Group. GII also consulted recent research on effective advocacy and the growing body of tools intended to help grantmakers and grantees improve policy advocacy.

The mission of the Aspen Institute’s Global Interdependence Initiative is to provide tools to support the work of advocates and others promoting ethical and effective U.S. responses to global challenges like poverty, human rights violations and climate change. Continuous Progress was funded by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 

For more information on the Aspen Institute’s Global Interdependence Initiative, visit
www.gii-exchange.org
 
For more information on the Continuous Progress guides, visit www.continuousprogress.org