“So What?” – Your BI-Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
After the project ends
What happens after a project closes out? Do positive impacts endure? Do unexpected outcomes emerge? When success is defined by impacts achieved during the project’s lifetime – not by the sustainability of impacts after the project has ended – we’re often missing answers to these questions. Check out this invigorating discussion on ex-post sustained impact evaluations, courtesy of the Pelican Initiative listserv. Triggered by Valuing Voice’s initial post on “what happens after the project ends” (see also posts 2 and 3), Pelicans offered thoughtful thoughts on what “sustained impacts” look like, along with links to additional helpful resources.
After the evaluation report is submitted
And speaking of post-project evaluations – how about a little post-project navel-gazing to improve our own evaluation practices? This AEA365 post reminds us of how post-evaluation debriefs with clients and the project team can help reveal what worked well and what did not – and what we might take away as useful lessons for future projects. So, y’know, we can get better at stuff.
Something worthy of your inbox
We were recently alerted to a new addition to the Blissfully Brief Newsletter field (of which So What? is a proud member). Feedback Labs has a new bi-weekly update called “Links We Like,” highlighting interesting short and longer reads that caught their eye. Worth signing up, sez us, because these are indeed very likable and interesting links. And the format is delightfully concise – kinda like us… but without the charming snark.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep.
