Minnesota Council on Foundations Blog – Philanthropy Potluck

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has long been a proponent of evaluation to assess the effectiveness of grant-funded programs. As a leader in the field, RWJF recently developed some new program evaluation resources and tools to help program officers, grant recipients, evaluators and others as they begin to assess the strengths and weaknesses of particular programs or initiatives.

Need better tools for stakeholder evaluation? This new guide may help.

A Practical Guide for Engaging Stakeholders in Developing Evaluation Questions, commissioned by RWJF and written by FSG Social Impact Advisors, is just one article in this series. The authors, Hallie Preskill and Nathalie Jones (experts at FSG’s Strategic Learning and Evaluation Center), define stakeholders as anyone with a vested interest in the program being evaluated – from clients, to program managers, policymakers, funders, academics and community members.

Evaluation findings will be most useful, relevant and credible when the opinions and concerns of stakeholders from different cultural, racial, ethnic, geographic, political, organizational and linguistic backgrounds are taken into account early in the evaluation process, the authors say.

So, how do you engage such a broad range of stakeholders in developing evaluation question? The authors outline a five-step process, and provide four worksheets to help.

Step 1: Prepare for stakeholder engagement: Before doing anything else, take the time to understand the program’s history, what it aims to accomplish, and how it defines success.

Step 2: Identify potential stakeholders: To assure the evaluation’s findings are useful to a broad range of audiences, consider stakeholders with different perspectives, expertise, responsibilities and influence.

Step 3: Prioritize the list of stakeholders: Balancing a diverse group of perspectives with limited resources takes discipline. This section provides tips to help prioritize stakeholders.

Step 4: Consider potential stakeholders’ motivations for participating: How you engage different stakeholders is likely to depend on their various motivations for participating. Different motivations will require different methods of engagement.

Step 5: Select a stakeholder engagement strategy: Finally, how to involve stakeholders in developing an evaluation’s key questions? This hefty section outlines a variety of factors and methods to consider.

This guide is practical, informative, and free of jargon. The hands-on planning worksheets are straightforward, and the additional evaluation resources comprehensive.

– Juliana Tillema, MCF research manager

Image CC Billso

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under collaboration, evaluation, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.