Last night I facilitated an Australasian Evaluation Society seminar in Melbourne on Real Time Evaluation . Whilst there are varied perspectives on what “Real Time Evaluation” means my presentation focused on conducting evaluations in a way that’s quick and in time to influence decision making and policy

I explored two main questions:

• How can we do evaluations quickly?
• How can we do them in a way which actually leads to maximising the influence of the evaluation on policy?

I provided two case studies.

• My evaluation of the Victorian Biodiversity Strategy
• Clear Horizon’s evaluations of the Volunteer Small Grants Program

I presented five mains points about how to achieve quick and timely evaluations that influence policy. In a discussion after the seminar the group came up with a few more and in total we agreed upon 9 points (see slide below)

Emphasis was on the involvement of people in the evaluation process and how people who are part of the evaluation process get influenced as individuals and then use their influence to change things. The real power is through the people not through the end result; the process of evaluation is just as important as the actual report.

In the case of the Victorian Evaluation Strategy the data collection phase was completed in eight weeks and we consulted with over 100 people. It was a fairly tight turn around. After the data collection process we held a large workshop (what we call a summit workshop) where 80 people attended. There was quite a polarity in the people there, from environmentalists to people from extractive industries, there was certainly polarized views. We presented the raw data, got them to work through it, analyse it and come up with a set of recommendations.

It was an amazingly successful day and the draft recommendations were written up as workshop notes. People from the Green Paper Group attended and were writing new policy on biodiversity towards the Land and Water White Paper. The policy writers actually used the recommendations from that workshop and it informed the green paper the on biodiversity two days later.

The report took nine months to come out, so we realised that if we had waited for the report to come out we would have missed the opportunity to influence policy. Running a large successful workshop with lots of people involved meant we could influence key people and thus policy. My main thesis is to involve people all the way through!