aes24 International Evaluation Conference

Authors: Julian King (Julian King & Associates Limited), Adrian Field (Dovetail Consulting Limited, NZ)

Evaluation rubrics are increasingly used to help make evaluative reasoning explicit. Rubrics can also be used as wayfinding tools to help stakeholders understand and participate meaningfully in evaluation. Developing rubrics is conceptually challenging work and the search is on for additional navigation tools and models that might help ease the cognitive load.

As a preliminary step toward rubric development it is often helpful to co-create a theory of change, proposing a chain of causality from actions to impacts, documenting a shared understanding of a program, and providing a point of reference for scoping a logical, coherent set of criteria.

However, it's easy to become disoriented when getting from a theory of change to a set of criteria, because the former deals with impact and the latter with value. Implicitly, a theory of change may focus on activities and impacts that people value, but this cannot be taken for granted - and we argue that value should be made more explicit in program theories.

Specifying a program's value proposition can improve wayfinding between a theory of change and a set of criteria, addressing the aspects of performance and value that matter to stakeholders. Defining a value proposition prompts us to think differently about a program. For example, in addition to what's already in the theory of change, we need to consider to whom the program is valuable, in what ways it is valuable, and how the value is created.

In this presentation, we will share what we've learnt about developing and using value propositions. We'll share a simple framework for developing a value proposition and, using roving microphones, engage participants in co-developing a value proposition in real time. We'll conclude the session by sharing some examples of value propositions from recent evaluations.