aes19 International Evaluation Conference

Kathryn Dinh (ZEST Health Strategies), Peta Leemen (The Fred Hollows Foundation)

Too often we see effort put into evaluation fall away once the report is complete, leaving findings that fail to make an impact.

This presentation outlines collaboration between The Fred Hollows Foundation and ZEST Health Strategies to evaluate a highly regarded program in a way that would maximise the usefulness of findings. From an initial intention to evaluate impact of the Comprehensive Eye Care Model in Vietnam, the evaluation ultimately used a modified realist evaluation approach to understand which combinations of operating contexts, program activities and people's motivations produced effective outcomes. The aim was to see which learnings from Vietnam could inform future program design across The Foundation.

The realist evaluation approach was new for The Foundation, and at first staff in Vietnam and Australia could not see what it meant, or how they could use the results. Introducing the approach involved communication to explain the rationale, and building an understanding of what different groups might value out of the process.

Throughout the evaluation, the evaluator and commissioner considered how best to communicate findings to different parts of the organisation, testing ideas with a reference group. A series of succinct and accessible communication products from the evaluation, tailored for different audiences, were developed to address different needs. A useful innovation was developing a series of case studies for program designers and accompanying PowerPoint presentation for internal use. These are now being used by program designers across The Foundation to inform their work.

In this presentation we share learnings from the NGO and evaluation consultant's perspectives. We discuss how ongoing consultation and consideration of the evaluation outputs helped motivate staff to be involved and see value in a new evaluation approach as well as to use the outputs. The presentation contributes to discussion among evaluators on maximising utility of evaluation results.