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Advocacy Evaluation Training: What Is Available?
Julia Coffman and Innovation Network
Within the advocacy evaluation field, resources are growing faster than awareness. New tools are being developed, but getting know-how into the hands of the advocates, evaluators, and funders who need it is lagging. To date, efforts to catalog available advocacy evaluation resources have been useful, but until now there has been no assessment of a core component of the field's infrastructure: training.
Advocacy evaluation training is critical to the field's future because increasing advocacy evaluation's use requires first increasing the number of people and organizations who understand its value and know how to do it.
With support from The California Endowment, Julia Coffman and Innovation Network recently completed a scan of available advocacy evaluation trainings. This article offers selected results of the scan.
Definitions and Scope
The scan focused on trainings in the United States. It included trainings that contain information about both advocacy (activities conducted to influence audiences or outcomes in order to advance public policy and social change) and evaluation (any aspect of the evaluation process, from planning to implementation to reporting and use of results). The scan defined training as in-person or web-based professional development workshops, courses, or seminars that have been offered at least once and could be offered again, or that are in development.
Training audiences could include advocates, evaluators, or funders. The scan did not include one- or two-hour presentations about advocacy evaluation, as the focus here was on longer and more applied sessions that build capacity and skills.
Scan Results
The scan identified 14 organizations that provide advocacy evaluation training (120KB .pdf). Analysis of these training opportunities revealed:
• Training is an area in need of growth. A number of prominent organizations train in this field, but not enough to meet demand. Also, advocacy evaluation trainers do not advertise or aggressively market their offerings, and knowing where to go for training requires some "insider" knowledge. This scan was designed, in part, to address the need for more knowledge about what is available and which organizations to turn to.
• Funders and evaluators are underserved. Most trainings target advocates as their audiences. Funders have fewer options for training, despite an increased focus on measuring their grantees' results; evaluators have even fewer.
• Front-end evaluation is emphasized more than methods. Most training curricula and associated tools emphasize evaluation planning. For example, theories of change and indicator development are popular training elements. This addresses a practical need: advocates tend to be most involved in the evaluation process early on. However, more trainings need to address data collection methods and implementation. This would not only better serve evaluators, it would ensure advocates have the knowledge and skills to follow through on their evaluation plans.
• Trainings combined with follow-up technical assistance can help ensure capacity is built. Half-day and even full-day trainings are limited in what they can accomplish. Ongoing coaching and technical assistance attached to trainings are valuable learning mechanisms as they can help ensure participants can apply evaluation approaches and tools once trainings end. Many of the organizations identified have the expertise to provide such follow up.
• Most trainings are newly developed. Because the advocacy evaluation field has emerged just recently, most trainings are new and organizations are still testing and refining their curricula and approaches.
You Can Help!
While the scan's goal was to capture as many advocacy evaluation trainings as possible, inevitably some trainings were missed. Do you know of other available advocacy evaluation training? If so, we want to hear from you! Email Innovation Network's Laura Ostenso at lostenso [at] innonet [dot] org. Please include the name of the organization or individual offering the training, and any known contact information. We will continue to update this document as new offerings are identified.
Julia Coffman is a senior consultant with Harvard Family Research Project and an independent evaluation consultant. She also serves on Innovation Network’s board of directors.
Additional work on the scan was done by Innovation Network Associates Johanna Gladfelter Morariu and Laura Ostenso.
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