The Evaluation Exchange: Advocacy and Policy Change

This 32-page issue of the series The Evaluation Exchange (Volume XIII, No. 1, Spring 2007), describes new developments in evaluating advocacy and policy change efforts that attempt to inform or influence public policy at the local, state, or federal levels. The issue contains an introduction from its director Heather B. Weiss, who writes: "Advocacy has long been one of these “hard-to-measure” activities... Advocacy here represents the strategies devised, actions taken, and solutions proposed to inform or influence local, state, or federal decision making... Advocacy strategies to inform or influence policy can include activities such as one-on-one meetings, testimony at hearings, community meetings or forums, coalition building, public education campaigns, street marches, media outreach, and electronic advocacy."

The four evaluations selected for the 'Evaluations to Watch' section highlight: using a 'prospective' approach - defining a project's short- and long-term goals up front and then evaluating advocates' progress toward those goals; basing evaluations on theories of policy process; using logic models; and using the "intense-period debrief" method to engage advocates in evaluation directly after intensive advocacy.

Its 'Theory and Practice' article differentiates evaluating advocacy and policy change from evaluating, for example, programmes or services. It includes four ways in which evaluators may adjust their approaches for results that are timely, useful in both the interim time frame and the evaluation's conclusion, user-friendly, and focused not only on policy change outcomes, but interim advocacy results.

An 'Ask the Experts' section asks questions of a range of organisations - from foundations making grants to alliances of grant recipients - about how they use evaluation of their advocacy strategies. In an interview article, two representatives of InterAction, an alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), discuss their ideas on evaluation advocacy, including finding effective stories about their work and measuring storytelling's influence as a means of policy change. In an article asking how evaluation looks to a "real-life" advocate, the co-director of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids writes about her use of evaluation to inform her organisation and demonstrate impact of their work. A "Q&A" section interviews an executive director who uses research-based evidence to attempt to change public systems affecting the health and well-being of New Mexico's low-income children.

'Beyond Basic Training' and 'Promising Practices', along with the 'Spotlight' section, highlight evolving practices in the field, attuned to practitioners looking for knowledge or experiences beyond the foundational. Content includes:

• nine principles to guide advocacy evaluation;
• increasing civic participation by harnessing the power of digital technology;
• three paradigms that show how constituency building and policy change efforts can work together to achieve sustainable and systemic reform;
• guidelines on how to evaluate non-profit networks that are used to achieve social change goals; and
• measuring how policy issues' visibility and momentum are transformed into political action.