Through to the second round competing for the Spindle Innovation Award for inclusive, sustainable development!

Margit van Wessel (WUR), Wenny Ho (Hivos) and Bodille Arensman (EUR/WUR) are taking part in the competition for the The Spindle Innovation Award: Best Idea 2017. We are through to the second round now! Our idea is for a new method for advocacy evaluation which we title 'Narrative Assessment'.

Here's why we're coming up with this. Many development organizations are doing advocacy. This advocacy will have to be evaluated. And organizations will run into three big challenges with that, which our idea will help resolve.

One challenge is: doing advocacy, there is no evidence-based practice that one can simply follow and do well. Good advocacy work comes from great practical judgement and the ability to manoeuvre and act upon complex and changing situations. Available  evaluation methods do not work from this and thus cannot really show the quality of advocacy work in a sensible way.

A second challenge is evidence. In available methods, rigor means high-quality evidence. But evidence is often not available or not accessible. Plus, getting serious about evidence may take up an entire evaluation budget.

A third challenge is that available methods are a lot about reporting outcomes. But what you get then, is lots of information that often still doesn’t tell a lot. Disconnected descriptions that fail to convey the meaning of achievements. It also doesn’t contribute much to learning. The challenge here is how to make evaluation contribute to understanding and future success.

Narrative Assessment, the new method we propose, seeks to make advocacy evaluation realistic, doable and much more meaningful. Over the coming months, we hope to develop our ideas into a widely usable, practical and inspiring method.