The biweekly ‘So What?’ guide highlights advice, events, and tips — mostly from the advocacy and evaluation worlds, selected by the Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program.
How to Manage Adaptive Management
We APEP-pers pride ourselves on being in relatively good shape: Both of us have at least passing familiarity with downward facing dog. But when it comes to evaluating adaptive initiatives, our (methodological) muscles and flexibility are put to the test. Adaptive programs use a purposefully exploratory, iterative, and responsive approach to design and planning, and acknowledge that plans are likely to change based on emerging evidence. As INTRAC’s Nigel Simister observes in a series of thoughtful blog posts on adaptive management, this has significant implications for how to integrate M&E into program design and planning and how to think about the roles of internal and external evaluation more broadly. Many of these points resonate with our own experience serving as the external evaluation partner for Independent Television Service’s Women and Girls Lead Global project. Our AEA365 post from this week’s Advocacy and Policy Change Week series summarizes a couple takeaways we gleaned from our five-year effort to keep up with — and learn how to be a good evaluation partner for — an adaptive project.
Can Advocates Still Love Facebook?
Our pals at Facebook keep making it just a bit tougher (cough cough China cough) to trust them, but we can’t pretend they aren’t a powerful force. So… seems like a good time to understand how to use Facebook (and Twitter)’s potential to be a force for good. If you are reading this eagerly at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) on Friday, June 8, then you still have time to catch this 4 PM EDT Facebook Live event on Social media advocacy: What you need to know about Facebook and Twitter’s new advertising policies. Big thanks to our friends at Bolder Advocacy for bringing the knowledge.
We See Some Movement in the Grass(roots)!
APEP blogged recently about the challenges that funders may have in supporting social movements, with a shout-out to a recent study from the Social Movement Learning Project at Innovation Network. Here’s some love for another take on grassroots movements and how philanthropy can support them from Redstone Strategy, and a link to a blog post on the same topic.
