Where to find Harder+Company at #eval17

|

We look forward to joining evaluation colleagues in Washington DC at the upcoming annual conference of the American Evaluation Association. If you are attending the conference, our staff will be presenting at sessions with clients and partners every day of the conference on a range of topics – a full chronological list is below.

If you can’t join us at the conference in person, you can follow the conversations on Twitter via the hashtag #eval17, and on our feed @harderco.

Wednesday, November 8

Beyond Culturally-Responsive Evaluation: Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating Equity-Oriented Organizational Practices

In this Think Tank, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of integrating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into evaluation strategies and organizational practices. In particular, we will explore how adopting an internal DEI framework can strengthen the quality, relevance, and credibility of evaluation practices.

Wednesday, November 8 | 6:15 pm – 7:15pm | Park Tower Suite 8210

Thursday, November 9

Addressing the “Elephant in the Room”: Tools for Mapping Power and Privilege to Advance Equity in Evaluation

As evaluators become increasingly aware of the influence of power, privilege, and race on strategies, programs, and engagement with communities, they are seeking guidance and resources to effectively address this “elephant in the room” and related issues in the context of their work. This hands-on workshop will offer practical tools that evaluators can use to identify and navigate issues of power and privilege in order to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in different settings, including ones that may not be receptive or attuned to those values. We wrote about this approach earlier this summer. Check out our session materials to learn more—the presentation, agenda, and mapping activity handout are available for download.

Thursday, November 9 | 8:00 am – 9:00 am | Park Tower Suite 8222

Evaluating Health Equity in Complex Environments: The Case of Health Impact Assessments

  • Lauren Stein, Research Associate
  • Abigail Baum, Senior Associate, Health Impact Project

Health Impact Assessments (HIA) are a popular tool for incorporating health considerations into decision-making in non-health sectors. This session will explore ways to apply an equity lens in evaluation. The panel will highlight opportunities to use equity-focused evaluation to promote health equity and address systematic differences in social determinants of health through policies, programs, and plans across health and non-health sectors.

Thursday, November 9 | 1:15 pm – 2:00 pm | Thurgood Salon 3

Evaluators, Know Thy Audience! How to Communicate Findings for Maximum Impact

  • Kevin Rafter, Director
  • Seth Klukoff, Senior Director, Equal Measure
  • Kristin Grimm, President, Spitfire Strategies

This demonstration session will show evaluators how to incorporate psychographics, people’s attitudes and interests, into communications planning for evaluations. Participants will learn proven tactics for how to craft messages that resonate with appropriate audiences – and that articulate the impact of their work. We will encourage participants to share their stories, and will conduct an activity in which participants can begin their own Mindful Messaging processes. This session builds on a presentation at #eval2016.

Thursday, November 9 | 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm | Park Tower Suite 8223

Peers as Evaluation Partners: Creating Meaningful Evaluations in Peer-Led Programs

With the growing focus on peer-run programs and the increasing visibility of peers in the behavioral health system throughout the United States, there is a need to identify best practices about how evaluators can effectively work with and evaluate peer-run programs. This roundtable session, will share our experiences working with peers to administer and collect data from standardized assessments, utilizing peers to conduct participant interviews and tips for sharing evaluation findings in meaningful ways with this audience.

Thursday, November 9 | 4:30 pm – 5:15 pm | Park Tower Suite 8205

Friday, November 10

Why Can’t We Be Friends? Learning to Navigate Evaluator-Intermediary-Funder Relationships to Maximize Learning and Impact

  • Michael Matsunaga, Senior Research Consultant
  • Kimberly Edmunds, Senior Consultant, Equal Measure
  • Clare Nolan, Founder, Engage R+D

How can you turn possible tensions across the evaluator-intermediary-funder partnership into productive ways of working that lead to improved learning and impact? Presenters will share approaches that worked and engage participants in a dilemma-solution process to address tensions that still exist. Read more here about Communicating Amid Complexity.

Friday, November 10 | 11:00 am – 11:45 am | Madison A

How Can Evaluation Support Participant Engagement and Service Alignment? Examples from Transitional Age Youth Programs

  • Cristina Magaña, Director
  • Aimée Fribourg, Senior Research Consultant
  • Sophia Lee, Research Consultant
  • Sarah Duffy, Data and Evaluation Manager, San Francisco Dept. of Children, Youth and Their Families
  • Thomas Lindman, Senior Data and Evaluation Analyst, San Francisco Dept. of Children, Youth, & Their Families
  • Krysta Esquivel, Associate Executive Director, YMCA of San Diego Youth and Family Services
  • Kristina Halmai, Specialty Consultant, YMCA of San Diego Youth and Family Services

Can evaluation help chip away at the seemingly intractable challenges of engaging hard-to-reach populations and aligning fragmented services? We believe it can. This panel will explore how evaluation informs both program design and funding approaches that target disconnected Transitional Age Youth (TAY). We will show how evaluation processes and findings are being used to inform strategies for engaging TAY and to foster greater collaboration among providers, highlighting lessons that can be applied to other hard-to-reach populations. The handout for this session is available for download here.

Friday, November 10 | 5:30 pm – 6:15pm | Washington 5

Form and Function: Using Tableau Dashboards to Make Program Data Dynamic, Accessible and Actionable

How can we present comprehensive programmatic data in a way that is reliable, accessible and actionable for program and evaluation staff? During this demonstration session, we will detail the critical steps of our design process and share real-time examples of the data dashboards in action. The internal evaluation team will explain how the dashboards are being used to inform decision-making and planning discussions within their organization.

Friday, November 10 | 5:30 pm – 6:15pm | Thurgood Salon 4

Using Evaluation to Support Impact and Sustainability of a National Health Network

  • Fontane Lo, Senior Research Consultant
  • Anna Saltzman, Senior Research Associate, Engage R+D
  • Matthew Bond, Director of Network Strategy, DentaQuest Foundation
  • Miriam Messinger, Director of Practice, Interaction Institute for Social Change
  • Katherine Libby, Program Director, Virginia Oral Health Coalition

For the past six years, the DentaQuest Foundation has helped cultivate a diverse network of hundreds of stakeholders, spanning all 50 states, focused on improving oral health for all Americans and addressing oral health equity. This session will show how various evaluation tools have been used, particularly by network leaders and other stakeholders, to document the network’s growth and impact, and support learning over time.

Friday, November 10 | 5:30 pm – 6:15pm | Washington 1

Saturday, November 11

How Do Organizations Learn? Findings and Implications for Evaluators

  • Paul Harder, CEO
  • Lisa Dropkin, Principal, Edge Research
  • Heather Peeler, Vice President, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

At some point in your evaluation career, you have likely had an experience where useful and relevant evaluation findings did not lead to meaningful change. How can we increase the likelihood that clients and stakeholders will use evaluation to strengthen their practices? Launching from the findings of a groundbreaking study of knowledge use in foundations based on interviews and surveys with over 700 funders, this session will bring perspectives from evaluation users and marketing research to understand the individual and organizational factors that influence knowledge acquisition and use. This session builds on insights from our blog about how foundations learn. Take a look at the handout for this session here.

Saturday, November 11 | 10:15 am – 11:00 am | Maryland C

Evaluation and Learning in an Uncertain Political Environment:  Lessons from the Affordable Care Act (ACA)

  • Joelle Greene, Director
  • Raúl Martínez, Director
  • Lori Nascimento, Evaluation Manager, The California Endowment
  • Sonia Taddy-Sandino, Founder, Engage R+D

Funders invest in many efforts to drive progress on complex social issues. During this session, panelists will share how evaluators working with The California Endowment, one of California’s largest foundations, are applying diverse skills and approaches that respond to external shifts and support learning and adaptation. Examples will draw on evaluation activities associated with the Endowment’s advocacy and movement building efforts to expand health coverage in California.

Saturday, November 11 | 11:15 am – 12:00 pm | Virginia A

SaveSave

Back to blog