Recommendation Revolution: Building Stakeholder Ownership For Implementation Through Co-Creation

Evaluators are expected to share findings, conclusions, and recommendations in a succinct report and clean presentation. An invisible and important line of objectivity creates distance between evaluators and those who commission evaluations to reduce bias. However, it can also prevent those most familiar with the work from sharing thoughts, perspectives, and insights outside of the data collection phase (e.g., formal interviews, focus groups, or surveys). Evaluation sponsors commission evaluations to strengthen programs, improve outcomes, and inform future program design. When recommendations developed by external evaluators unintentionally ignore subtle nuances and/or are financially or culturally infeasible in their context, they lose value. We can try to put ourselves in their shoes, but as external evaluators, we don’t live in their organization day in and day out.
How can we help veteran and emerging evaluators alike rethink how to take a more collaborative approach that involves the people who are tasked with implementing the recommendations? Co-create recommendations.
When people contribute to draft recommendations, they feel heard and are more willing to change and accept new information. Conducting co-creation with clients can tap into their unique knowledge and diverse perspectives to validate and refine recommendations, foster greater ownership of evaluation products, and create buy-in for implementing recommendations after finalization. We will offer concrete steps evaluators can take to bolster the immediate and long-term value of evaluations through lessons learned using co-creation with government clients.
We will invite participants to share how past evaluations might have benefitted from co-creation and increased the likelihood of evaluation use. We will ask how participants might co-create recommendations while still maintaining independence in the final drafting.
We will provide examples of different evaluation types (e.g.: process, outcomes, and/or formative) that we have conducted and share best practices we integrated into our collaborative process for each study. By co-creating program recommendations, we increase the chances that the evaluation sparks positive change and reduces the potential burden of having useless recommendations paid for with taxpayer or donor dollars.