|
|
|
Newsletter: April 2015
| Vol 15, Issue 4
|
|
|
|
|
|
Message from the President - Envisioning a Bright Future for AEA
| 
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Abraham Lincoln & Peter F. Drucker
Greetings Colleagues,
I hope spring brings you health and happiness and much prosperity to all your evaluation efforts. The AEA Board finds itself this spring energized and engaged in a broad range of activities focused on improving the evaluation profession. It will be a time for serious self-reflection as we embark on a journey beginning at our May Board meeting to envision the AEA we want in the next 5 to 10 years.
AEA as an organization has grown rapidly - from approximately 3,000 members in 2003 to more than 7,000 members in 2015. This kind of rapid growth offers opportunities as well as challenges. The AEA Board is now committed to thinking strategically about the opportunities and challenges that face us over the next decade.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Diversity - AEA International Partnership Protocol Members Share Their Experiences, Lessons Learned at Washington Evaluators
|
From Zachary Grays, AEA Headquarters
This March, AEA welcomed the very first Voluntary Organization for Professional Evaluators (VOPE) to participate in the AEA International Partnership Protocol. This program offers the opportunity for the American Evaluation Association, by means of its executive director, to support the strengthening of peer VOPEs through mutually beneficial partnerships. An initiative a few years in the making, the objective of the program is to strengthen the field of evaluation by strengthening the professional organizations and its practitioners. Through funds made available through the program, Tatiana Tretiakova, coordinator at the National Monitoring and Evaluation Network of the Kyrgyz Republic, and Alisher Nazirov, member of the Monitoring and Evaluation Community of Practice of Tajikistan, had the opportunity to make a presentation on the development of evaluation in the Central Asian region and meet with the wider staff of the Washington Evaluators to seek advice from their experience and discuss possible cooperation with their colleagues of the Central Asian Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluations. While a formal report of their experience will be made available for review, AEA took the opportunity to ask Tatiana and Alisher to recap their visit and share firsthand how they benefited from their trip.
Continue Reading
|
|
Potent Presentations Initiative - A New Face and Name at p2i
|
From Sheila B. Robinson, Potent Presentations Initiative Coordinator
Happy spring and happy birthday to Potent Presentations! It's been three years since the launch of the p2i initiative and its amazing assemblage of resources on message, design, and delivery, along with additional checklists and tools to support your ability to develop powerful presentations for conferences, keynotes, courses, professional development, and everyday evaluation practices.
You may notice a different face and name here this month. Yes, this is Sheila B. Robinson, taking over where Stephanie Evergreen, p2i founder and coordinator emeritus, left off. You may recognize me from aea365 Tip-A-Day By and For Evaluators, where I've been lead curator of the blog for the last couple of years. Or perhaps you recognize me from my own evaluation-related blog at sheilabrobinson.com, where I also write about presentations.
Continue Reading
|
|
International Policy Update - Five AEA Members Helping to Advance Evaluation Globally
|
From Mike Hendricks, AEA Representative to the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE), with contributions from Jim Rugh, EvalPartners Co-Coordinator
Many AEA members work internationally, and almost 20 percent of AEA members actually live outside the U.S., so it's a little unfair to single out just a few members for special attention. However, these five members (or six, if you allow us some leeway) have made especially visible contributions in the past few months, so perhaps we can highlight them simply as visible symbols of the many AEA members who routinely are advancing evaluation on a global scale. If so, let's tip our caps to these five internationally minded AEA members (in alphabetical order, to be fair).
Continue Reading
|
|
AEA Accepting Letters of Interest on Environmental Sustainability Audit
|
The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is accepting letters of interest to conduct an environmental sustainability audit. AEA has allocated up to $10,000 to conduct the audit (with an anticipated range of costs between $8,000 - $10,000). The purpose of the audit is to assess the environmental impact of the AEA operations (see www.eval.org). Such an audit would highlight opportunities for improvement as well as identify long-term best practices. In addition, AEA would like to use the audit experience to educate its members on benefits and outcomes of such a process. If you are interested in conducting the audit, please provide responses to the following seven questions in no more than two pages total:
1. What is your general approach to conducting an environmental audit? For example, do you have a specific template, set of questions, and/or process for the audit?
2. What types of organizations have you performed sustainability audits for? (Please include any professional organizations if applicable.) Please provide the name of at least one organization or company that we could contact.
3. In what ways and to what extent does your process take into account economic and social sustainability as well as environmental sustainability?
4. AEA would like to complete the audit no later than December 2015. Please provide comments on a timeline that accomplishes this completion date.
5. What commitments will you need from staff and association members to assist in data gathering?
6. How do you benchmark? Please relate your approach to the Future-Fit Business Benchmark. (It is not necessary to use this benchmarking approach; we simply want to understand how you see the connection of your approach to the future-fit business benchmark orientation.)
7. AEA has established a working group that includes AEA members, board members, and staff to assist in the audit process. What will you need from the working group to carry out the audit in a way that accomplishes our purposes?
The Environmental Sustainability Working Group will review the letters of interest and select up to 10 for phone interviews. Up to three respondents will be invited to submit a proposal with staffing and budgets that detail their approach.
Please submit letters of interest by email to Denise Roosendaal, AEA executive director (droosendaal@eval.org), no later than May 6, 2015. The phone interviews are anticipated to occur in the first two to three weeks of May. Proposals are expected to be requested by early June, and a decision will be made by June 26, 2015.
|
| AEA Welcomes the Design and Analysis of Experiments TIG |
The Design and Analysis of Experiments Topical Interest Group's purpose is to provide an active forum for AEA members who specialize in or have special interest in experimental evaluation research to connect and advance the methods and practice of this segment of the evaluation field. The establishment of this new TIG will create a welcoming space for those interested in experimental evaluation, and it will provide an opportunity for advancing scholarship through AEA on issues concerning experimental evaluation research.
Here are just some of the planned activities for this TIG:
- Highlight connections to other TIGs through co-sponsoring conference sessions with related TIGs.
- An open meeting will be held at the conference to solicit additional input from interested members regarding the best directions for the TIG while also identifying additional members who are willing to offer leadership in building the TIG.
Click here to join! (login required)
TIG Chair and Program Chair:
Laura Peck
Abt Associates Inc., Social & Economic Policy Division
Laura_Peck@abtassoc.com
|
|
eLearning Update - Discover eStudy Courses
|
Our eStudy program is made up of in-depth virtual professional development courses. Below are upcoming eStudy offerings:
Intermediate Development Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use
May 5, 7, 12 & 14
2:00 - 3:30 p.m. EDT
This eStudy is geared for an audience with intermediate-level interest and/or expertise in developmental evaluation (DE). It will focus on actually doing developmental evaluations. DE is especially appropriate for innovative initiatives or organizations in dynamic and complex environments where participants, conditions, interventions, and context are turbulent, pathways for achieving desired outcomes are uncertain, and conflicts about what to do are high. DE supports reality-testing, innovation, and adaptation in complex dynamic systems where relationships among critical elements are nonlinear and emergent. Evaluation use in such environments focuses on continuous and ongoing adaptation, intensive reflective practice, and rapid, real-time feedback. The purpose of DE is to help develop and adapt the intervention (different from improving a model). This evaluation approach involves partnering relationships between social innovators and evaluators in which the evaluator's role focuses on helping innovators embed evaluative thinking into their decision-making processes as part of their ongoing design and implementation initiatives. DE can apply to any complex change effort anywhere in the world. Through lecture, discussion, and small-group practice exercises, this workshop will position DE as an important option for evaluation in contrast to formative and summative evaluations as well as other approaches to evaluation.
Applications of Correlation and Regression
May 26 & 28
1:00 - 2:30 p.m. EDT
Attendees will learn how to screen and prepare data for regression analysis, how to identify where regression would be useful, how to conduct mediation and moderation analyses with SPSS, how to interpret SPSS regression output, and how to present regression findings to a lay audience.
|
 |
|
New Jobs & RFPs from AEA's Career Center
|
- Extension Specialist, Program Development and Evaluation at University of New Hampshire (Durham, New Hampshire)
- Director of Evaluation and Assessment at University of California, Riverside (Riverside, California)
- Associate Director at Arabella Advisers (San Francisco, California)
- Evaluation Consultant at Equal Measure (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
- Senior Program Evaluation Specialist at City University of New York, School of Professional Studies (Albany, New York)
- Ph.D. Program Evaluator/Public Health Scientist at US Army Public Health Command (Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland)
- Evaluation Specialist at Michigan Public Health Institute (Okemos, Michigan)
- Evaluation Analyst at The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Ottawa, Ontario)
- Business Analytics Officer at Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County (Boynton Beach, Florida)
|
| About Us | |
AEA is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of evaluation in all its forms.
The association's mission is to:
- Improve evaluation practices and methods.
- Increase evaluation use.
- Promote evaluation as a profession.
- Support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.
phone: 1-202-367-1166 or 1-888-232-2275 (U.S. and Canada only)
|
| Important Note |
To ensure this newsletter reaches you every month, add info@eval.org to your email contacts!
|
| Welcome, New AEA Members! |
Click here to view a complete list of AEA's newest members.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
