aes24 International Evaluation Conference

Authors: Ossie Lang (RMCG ),Donna Lucas (RMCG ),Carl Larsen (RMCG ),Zarmeen Hassan (AUSVEG ),Cherry Emerick (AUSVEG ),Olive Hood (Hort Innovation )

How do you align ten regionally delivered projects with differing focus topics to nationally consistent outcomes? Take advantage of this opportunity to explore the journey of building and implementing a robust Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) program that showcases regional nuances and aligns national outcomes, making a significant contribution to the success of this horticultural industry extension project.

Join us for an insightful presentation on how a national vegetable extension project focused on adoption of best management practices on-farm, has successfully implemented a dynamic M&E program. Over the two and a half years of project delivery, the national M&E manager, in collaboration with ten regional partners, has crafted a program that demonstrates regional impact consistently on a national scale and adapts to the project's evolving needs.

The presentation will highlight the team's key strategies, including the upskilling of Regional Development Officers in M&E practices. Learn how templates and tools were designed to ensure consistent data collection across approximately 40 topics. The team will share the frameworks utilised to capture quantitative and qualitative monitoring data, providing a holistic view of tracking progress against national and regional outcomes and informing continuous improvement in regional delivery.

Flexibility has been a cornerstone of the M&E program, allowing it to respond to the changing needs of growers, industry, and the funding partner and seamlessly incorporate additional data points. Discover how this adaptability has enhanced the project's overall impact assessment and shaped its delivery strategy.

The presentation will not only delve into the national perspective but also feature a firsthand account from one of the Regional Development Officers. Gain insights into how the M&E program has supported their on-the-ground delivery, instilling confidence in providing data back to the national project manager. This unique perspective offers a real-world understanding of the national program's effectiveness at a regional level.

Author Lena Etuk (CIRCA Research, AU)

In this presentation we will outline an approach to culturally inclusive evaluation with people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in Australia, its strengths, and its growth opportunities. This approach fills a critical gap in the way evaluation and research with culturally and linguistically diverse communities is traditionally conducted in Australia.

In this presentation we will explain how the Cultural & Indigenous Research Centre Australia (CIRCA) conducts in-culture and in-language evaluation with diverse cohorts of Australians, and how this practice fits within the broader methodological discourse in evaluation and social science more broadly. We will illustrate how our culturally inclusive methodology is put into practice with findings from CIRCA's own internal research into the way cultural considerations shape our data collection process. We will conclude with reflections on how CIRCA might further draw on and leverage standpoint theory and culturally responsive evaluation as this practice is further refined.

Our key argument is that doing culturally inclusive evaluation is a process that requires reflexivity and learning, alongside strong and transparent institutional processes. Combining these approaches creates systemic ways of acknowledging and working within stratified and unequal social systems, inherent to any research. Our findings will advance knowledge within the field of evaluation about how to engage and represent culturally and linguistically diverse community members across Australia.

Authors: Ellie Taylor (The Salvation Army)

Amplifying survivor voices has been the cornerstone of The Salvation Army's work in the anti-slavery realm. How does this translate to the monitoring and evaluation space? How do we truly represent the voices and experiences of those with lived experience of modern slavery in monitoring and evaluation, whilst aligning with key human rights principles?

Our Research Team are exploring how to centre survivor voices in the evaluation space. This session will detail use of a representative participatory evaluation approach to monitor and evaluate the Lived Experience Engagement Program (LEEP) for survivors of criminal labour exploitation. In this session we will explore the challenges and learnings uncovered through this project.

The LEEP is designed to empower survivors of criminal labour exploitation to share their expertise to make change. Piloted in 2022-2023, and continuing into 2024-2025, the LEEP - and resulting Survivor Advisory Council - provides a forum for survivors to use their lived experience to consult with government - to assist in preventing, identifying and responding to modern slavery.

The key points explored in this session will include:

• Realities of implementing an adaptive model, including continuous integration of evaluation findings into an iterative survivor engagement model.
• The importance of stakeholder inclusivity, integrating lived experience voices and amplifying them alongside program facilitators and government representatives.
• Complexities of evaluation in the modern slavery space, particularly when victim-survivors of forced marriage are included. We will speak to the need for trauma-informed, strengths-based measures and facilitating partnerships with the people the program serves.

Leading the session will be the The Salvation Army's project lead with a PhD in mental health and over 12 years of experience working with diverse community groups in Australia and internationally. They have extensive experience presenting at conferences both domestically and internationally.

Authors: Donna Loveridge (Independent Consultant), Ed Hedley (Itad Ltd UK, GB)

The nature and magnitude of global challenges, such as climate change, poverty and inequality, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and so on, means that $4 trillion is needed annually to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Government and philanthropic funding is not enough but additional tools include businesses and sustainable finance. Evaluators may relate to many objectives that business and sustainable finance seek to contribute to but discomfort can arise in the mixing of profit, financial returns, impact and purpose.

Sustainable finance, impact investing, and business for good are growing globally and provides opportunities and challenges for evaluators, evaluation practice and the profession.
This session explores this new landscape and examines:

• What makes us uncomfortable about dual objectives of purpose and profit, notions of finance and public good, and unfamiliar stakeholders and languages, and what evaluators can do in response.
• The opportunities for evaluators to contribute to solving interesting and complex problems with current tools and skills and where is the space for developing evaluation theory and practice.
• How evaluation practice and evaluators' competencies might expand and deepen, and not get left behind in these new fields, and also sustaining evaluations relevance to addressing complex challenges.

The session draws on experience in Australia and internationally to share some practical navigation maps, tools and tips to help evaluators traverse issues of values and value, working with investors and businesses, and identify opportunities to add value.

Authors: Stephanie Quail (ARTD Consultants), Kathleen De Rooy (ARTD Consultants, AU)

Progress reports and case notes contain rich information about program participants' experiences and frequently describe theoretically important risk and protective factors that are not typically recorded in administrative datasets. However, the unstructured narrative nature of these types of data - and, often, the sheer volume of it - is a barrier for human-drive qualitative analysis of this data. Often, the data cannot be included in evaluations because it is too time and resource intensive to do so.

This paper will describe three approaches to the qualitative analysis of progress reports used to examine within-program trajectories for participants, and the factors important for program success as part of an evaluation of the Queensland Drug and Alcohol Court.

It will explore how we navigated the balance between human and machine-driven qualitative analysis. We will reflect on the benefits and challenges of text-mining - how humans and machines stack up against each other when identifying the sentiment and emotion in text, the strengths and challenges of each approach, the lessons we have learned, and considerations for using these types of approaches to analyse datasets of progress reports in future evaluations.

Authors: Ethel Karskens (Clear Horizon)

This presentation covers the strategic integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies for qualitative data analysis in evaluation processes. The increasing demand for sophisticated analytical tools necessitates a deep dive into AI's transformative potential in streamlining qualitative analysis. Through practical demonstrations and case studies, this session showcases how AI technologies can efficiently tackle the complexities of analysing qualitative data. Attendees will acquire actionable insights into leveraging AI to augment the efficiency and accuracy of qualitative analysis, empowering them to navigate the evolving landscape of evaluation methodologies.

Additionally, the presentation conducts a comprehensive comparative analysis of major AI models available in the market. By delineating their unique strengths and functionalities, participants will gain invaluable discernment in selecting the most appropriate AI model tailored to their evaluation objectives.

Moreover, the session delves into robust quality assurance (QA) strategies for validating AI-generated outputs, emphasising the essential role of evaluators as integral stakeholders in the analysis process. Attendees will explore techniques for seamlessly integrating human expertise with AI capabilities to refine and validate analysis outcomes. We will also explore ways to do this in a way that respects common data privacy laws and policies. By fostering a symbiotic relationship between AI technologies and human evaluators, this presentation underscores the importance of collaborative synergy in optimising evaluation efficacy.

In conclusion, this presentation offers a comprehensive exploration of the transformative potential of AI in qualitative data analysis within evaluation contexts. Attendees will depart equipped with actionable strategies and insights to harness AI's power effectively, elevating the quality and efficiency of their evaluation processes to new heights.

Authors: Gerard Atkinson (ARTD Consultants)

Last year saw the rise of large language models, with words like Chat-GPT and Bard becoming part of common discussion. The evaluation community was not immune to this trend, and papers were published that looked at just how well machine learning approaches could do against human evaluators on topics such as qualitative analysis and evaluative judgement. The answer? Not as well as you would think (but you could get wrong answers faster than ever!)

But the designers of these models took on the feedback and created newer and more sophisticated tools. In addition, there have been innovations in hybrid models which combine the best features of different methods while minimising their weaknesses. Coupled to this is the growing field of standalone models that can be run on a desktop computer but produce responses that match or exceed cloud-based models, and models that can draw on rich contextual information (such as documentation or full interview transcripts) to make decisions.

This presentation provides an update on the state of machine learning in 2024 and presents new findings in relation to the performance of machine learning models on tasks including topic classification and rubric analysis.

Authors: Katrina Barnes (Clear Horizon), Irene Guijt (Oxfam Great Britain, GB), Chipo Peggah (Oxfam Great Britain, ZW)

Traditional measures of success for international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have been based on western (and often colonial), theories of change, use of predefined metrics and ways of knowing - rarely fitting local realities and interests. Projectised pre-determined understandings of change, limit honest reflection on larger transformative change, and inhibit meaningful learning and adaptation.

INGOs globally are being challenged to decolonise their knowledge and evaluation processes. Over the past 18 months, Oxfam Great Britain has undergone a journey to redesign how we understand impact, to rebalance and reframe accountability and strengthen learning. This new approach focuses on collective storytelling, sensemaking and regular reflection on practice. We are taking a theory-led approach to make meaning out of signals that systems are shifting across a portfolio of work. Drawing on a bricolage of various evaluation methodologies (Outcome Harvesting-lite, meta-evaluation and synthesis, evaluative rubrics, and impact evaluations) we are slowly building a picture up over time across the organisation, to tell a story of systemic change. We have seen how meaningful and honest evidence and learning processes, have enabled a stronger culture of learning.

Although we are far from the end of this journey, we have learnt some critical lessons and face ongoing challenges. We are not the only ones, many foundations, funders, and philanthropic organisations are going through similar processes as organisations increasingly try to understand their contribution to systems change. These conversations are therefore imperative to the field of evaluation, as organisations navigate new ways to 'evaluate' their own work.

At this presentation, we will start the discussion by sharing Oxfam Great Britain's journey with key challenges faced and lessons learnt. After this, we will invite a Q&A conversation to harvest insights from others also seeking to reimagine organisational learning that is grounded in decolonising knowledge processes and seeking to understand systems change.