What’s New: Quick Updates from Around the Field

Gates Joins Advocacy Conversation: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is exploring new ways to evaluate its expanding policy and advocacy portfolio. Over the last year, the Gates Foundation has developed outcomes frameworks for their community engagement work and launched several small evaluations. Senior Impact Planning and Improvement Officer Kendall Guthrie noted, “As the program officers are increasingly supporting public policy advocacy work, the Foundation is exploring how we take a more coherent approach to monitoring these grants in an appropriate manner and to help our grantees better assess the short and long term impact of their work.”

Children’s Advocacy Discussion: On August 23, the Child Advocacy Institute held a conference call entitled Advocacy Evaluation: New Thinking and New Ideas about ‘Hard-to-Measure Activities.’ The Child Advocacy Institute is a project of Voices for America’s Children. The call features Voices staff and members discussing their experiences of emerging practices in child advocacy evaluation. A recording of the call and its accompanying PowerPoint presentation are available at the Voices for America’s Children website.

Evaluating Advocacy Coalition Work and Influence: Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based organization that works internationally, has published Monitoring and Evaluating Advocacy Efforts: Learning from Successes and Challenges. This online article focuses on the evaluation of advocacy work performed on behalf of youth in Africa, and addresses the difficulty in attributing policy changes to a particular organization or network. The article suggests that organizations should be aware of advocacy efforts on similar issues that might be affecting policy makers elsewhere in order to accurately assess their own effectiveness. Also addressed is another advocacy evaluation challenge—assessing changes in thinking. Read the article on the Advocates for Youth website.

Irvine Foundation Reports on Best Practices for Voter Mobilization: The Irvine Foundation has recently release an evaluation report on its California Votes Initiative. The report describes best practices for voter mobilization efforts in communities with low voter turnout. The evaluation findings "indicate a strong correlation between the level of personal connection made through outreach and the likelihood that the members of a community with historically low voter participation will vote." Topics for further study are also included. An evaluation team composed of advocates from California State University, East Bay; University of California, Irvine; and Yale University collaborated with the nine organizations funded by the Irvine Foundation to evaluate the organizations' voter outreach support for two election cycles in 2006 and one election cycle in 2007. Read the report (.pdf) on the Foundation's website (44 pages, may take some time to download).

TCC Group Resources for Advocacy Organizational Capacity: TCC Group has developed an organizational assessment tool for policy and advocacy organizations, and is working on papers addressing organizational capacity and general support funding. The "Advocacy CCAT" is a supplemental tool to TCC Group’s more comprehensive Core Capacity Assessment Tool (www.tccccat.com). Both tools assess four core capacities of successful organizations: leadership, adaptive, management, and technical capacities. The Advocacy CCAT drills deeper into each of these four core capacities, adding and assessing capacities that are unique to policy and advocacy organizations.

In addition to the core capacities, organizational culture plays an important role in organizational effectiveness. The Advocacy CCAT includes cultural elements that are important for policy and advocacy organizations. These include:

Willingness to take risks and advocate even when success is not guaranteed
Overt acknowledgement of the value of partner organizations
Overt acknowledgement of the value of individual staff members
Celebration of success, both small and large scale
Level of staff commitment to an issue

For more information about the supplemental Advocacy CCAT, contact TCC Group at 215-568-0399 or email your request to: info [at] tccgrp.com. Introductory pricing is now available.

TCC is also in the process of finalizing two papers relevant to advocacy organizations. The first discusses organizational capacity for policy and advocacy organizations, including ideas for evaluating organizational capacity. The second explores the unique role that general support funding can play for advocacy organizations. Both papers are being produced in collaboration with The California Endowment, and are due out at the beginning of 2008.

ORS—Improving Public Policy for Children: A pilot project to determine what works best to improve public policy for children is being conducted by Organizational Research Services (ORS) with KIDS COUNT organizations in four states.

KIDS COUNT groups are funded by Annie E. Casey Foundation to provide credible data about the welfare of children in their states for the purpose of informing state policy. The organizations employ variance strategies to make their data useful, ranging from research and dissemination to full-fledged advocacy campaigns. The framework for the evaluation is based on ORS’ A Practical Guide to Documenting Influence and Leverage in Making Connections Communities [read an abstract, or click here for the full document (.pdf, 71 pages, may take some time to download)].

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