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From the Director's DeskWelcome to the first of what we expect will be several issues in Harvard Family Research Project's “Hard-to-Measure” Evaluation Exchange series. For years, certain kinds of nonprofit activities have received relatively little attention in the evaluation arena. While evaluators may not have much difficulty coming up with ways to assess direct services, when we encounter activities that fall outside of our evaluation comfort zone, we tend to get intimidated and give them a wide berth. Advocacy has long been one of these “hard-to-measure” activities. Until very recently, few resources existed to guide evaluation in this area. In just the last year, however, advocacy evaluation has become a burgeoning field. As this issue makes clear, enterprising evaluators, nonprofits, and funders are tackling advocacy's hard-to-measure distinction and are sharing their ideas and approaches. This issue of The Evaluation Exchange helps to build this new field by defining advocacy and policy change evaluation and summarizing the new developments shaping it. The issue describes how advocacy and policy change evaluations differ from other evaluations and offers examples of what those differences look like in real-life evaluation practice. It also features the voices of funders and advocates, who explain what they want from evaluation. And it offers descriptions of new tools—both written and electronic—that we can draw on for ideas. Before you turn the page and read on, let me be clear about how we define advocacy in this issue. Advocacy here represents the strategies devised, actions taken, and solutions proposed to inform or influence local, state, or federal decision making. In the pages that follow, we concentrate specifically on advocacy that connects to public policy or legislation. 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. Advocacy may be done by a range of individuals and groups, including professional advocates, community members, researchers, and policy analysts, and it may target different players in the policy process, including elected officials, government administrators, and the media. Though we purposely keep our definition narrow in this issue, we recognize that advocacy can be defined much more broadly, both in terms of the activities it encompasses and its desired goal. For example, advocacy's goal might extend to achieving social justice—that is, fair treatment for all members of society—but socially just results may or may not include changes in public policy. In addition, our definition does not explicitly cover advocacy focused on community organizing or participatory democracy. We hope that future issues will address how evaluators are working within this broader definition of advocacy. We anticipate that this and future Evaluation Exchange issues featuring coverage of hard-to-measure topics will be met with enthusiasm. I welcome you to share work on evaluating advocacy and policy change that you would like to see featured and ideas on other evaluation topics that are challenging you. Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D. ^ Back to top |
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