If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have seen earlier posts with our suggestions for building and maintaining an effective Evaluation Advisory Committee (EAC). As ICH’s work matures and deepens, my colleagues Carolyn Fisher and Jordan Kron and I have developed some additional tips on how to keep a group running over the long term.
Using the Voices 2.0 EAC as a case study, I will highlight in this post some of the unique methods that facilitators can use to be responsive to the needs of committee members and adaptive to an everchanging environment. Specifically, I will focus on strategies to navigate common participant engagement patterns that may arise as a committee matures, as well as strategies to sustain the work of the committee as a whole.
Case Review:
The Voices for Health Justice 2.0 Program (Voices) is a large grant program that supports health-equity focused projects led by coalitions of community grassroots organizations, advocacy organizations, and policy organizations across 22 states. The Institute for Community Health (ICH) is contracted to design and execute a robust evaluation to help Voices funders understand the efficacy of the program model. To support this work and help shape the evaluation, ICH convened an advisory committee of staff from 10 different grantee organizations. There is mutual benefit in convening an EAC: the evaluation is strengthened by the perspective of the staff from these organizations, and EAC members have the chance to network and build relationships with evaluators and other grantees, and learn valuable professional skills, all while being compensated for their time.
We’ve had success in promoting relationships both between evaluators and committee members and between the committee members themselves. However, we began to notice a drop in engagement—fewer attendees at meetings, inconsistent email communication—corresponding with the end of our intensive evaluation design period. At this time two committee members also chose to step down from the committee due to competing professional obligations. These patterns of decreasing engagement seemed to intensify leading up to the 2024 presidential election. The evaluation team speculated that in addition to the political and professional distractions, it was possible that committee members may have perceived a reduction in the personal value of their participation. We met internally to brainstorm ways to increase participant engagement and highlight the benefits of participation. The idea that rose to the top was to offer lower-barrier and asynchronous engagement opportunities, like questionnaires.
Following internal discussion, we met with and emailed several individual members to get their thoughts on using questionnaires as an addition to and/or as a replacement for our quarterly meetings. Committee members were receptive to this idea, and also offered suggestions around ways to use our meeting time to support their professional development. Committee members were especially interested in training on evaluation topics and on expert-led discussions and guidance about the current funding landscape. Given this critical member feedback, the evaluation team fielded a questionnaire to replace our scheduled June meeting. The questionnaire was designed to solicit feedback on our ongoing evaluation activities and to help us further develop the content for our upcoming meetings. The questionnaire was well received and we were praised for taking the time to pause and pivot. Through the questionnaires we learned of a number of new low-barrier strategies to creatively engage our committee members. We are currently working to implement these strategies.
Major takeaways
It is not unusual to see a decrease in EAC member availability; individual capacities and the environments in which we work are constantly evolving. With this in mind, it is important to remain attentive to the needs of committee members and be willing to adapt and fine-tune processes so that members realize the intended mutual benefit. In this case, a re-emphasis on making the committee a bi-directional learning community and the use of low-barrier engagement methods helped us re-engage with the Voices EAC members. While we arrived at these strategies for this case, each committee is unique. It is important to get input from your committee members about their own priorities and preferences both in order to identify what works best for your situation and to build buy-in from committee members for the strategy identified for moving forward.