Designing Evaluation and Communication for Impact (DECI-3)
Programs and partnerships
Lead institution(s)
Summary
Research interventions need to be effective in order to contribute to positive change, but effective research for development is difficult; there are no blueprints, and each project requires a strategy that suits its own changing context.Read more
Research interventions need to be effective in order to contribute to positive change, but effective research for development is difficult; there are no blueprints, and each project requires a strategy that suits its own changing context. A recent external evaluation found that IDRC grantees benefit from having a learning partner that provides a space for pause, reflection, and strategic planning during implementation, a process known as adaptive management.
Building on the lessons from this evaluation, the Designing Evaluation and Communication for Impact (DECI-3) project provides support to help partners of IDRC’s Networked Economies’ program become adaptive managers and more effective change agents. The Networked Economies program explores how developing countries can take advantage of the rapid diffusion of networked technologies for economic and social development. Specifically, the program seeks to spur economic growth and create employment opportunities by scaling innovative solutions.
The DECI-3 methodology brings together a combination of evaluation, communication, and learning methods, providing capacity development through just-in-time mentoring during the full project cycle. Working with Ottawa-based partner New Economy Development Group, Inc., DECI-3 aims to build the capacity of partners (projects and institutions) in evaluation, communication, and learning methods as the building blocks for adaptive management. It also aims to learn from the action-research experiences and share understanding of the theoretical and practical dimensions of improving the effectiveness of research-to-policy initiatives.
Research outputs
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Building on the lessons from this evaluation, the Designing Evaluation and Communication for Impact (DECI-3) project provides support to help Networked Economies’ partners become adaptive managers and more effective change agents. The DECI-3 methodology brings together a combination of evaluation, communication and learning methods, providing capacity development through ‘just-in-time’ mentoring during the full project cycle. Effective research for development is difficult: there are no blueprints, and each project requires a strategy that suits its own changing context. The aim is to help research for development projects improve their impact as change agents.
The decision-making framework enables projects and programs to take ownership of their evaluation and communication plans. The framework covered in this article is a blend of utilization-focused evaluation (UFE) and research communication supported by mentoring. This detailed paper summarizes over six years of action-research in capacity development in the fields of evaluation and communication. It is based on experience with the two-phased Developing Evaluation Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI) project which was made up of a team of practitioners spread over three continents.
In order to address “readiness” early on, the article brings attention to examples that highlight three dimensions of readiness: the power to design, the commitment to learn, and building an evaluation culture. Readiness is a lynchpin that shapes every subsequent step of the evaluation process. Collaborative Approaches to Evaluation (CAE) and Utilization-Focused Evaluation (UFE) belong to a family of evaluation frameworks that promote the use of evaluation for decision making, with emphasis on engaging those who will be the users of the evaluation findings.
Communication for social change is rarely a stand-alone initiative. It is often combined with multiple communication purposes, like networking, organizational visibility, information dissemination, or behavioural change. The article reports on an inter-disciplinary, capacity building experiment that combines communication strategy development with Utilization-Focused Evaluation (UFE). An external evaluation of the DECI-2 project observes that the combined decision-making process enabled partners to become better at adaptive management.
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