ORS has completed its work for World Vision to develop Theory of Change and a Monitoring and Evaluation plan for their Child Health Now (CHN) campaign. CHN is World Vision's first truly global advocacy campaign; ORS led a team spread from Australia to London through defining outcomes, indicators, and data collection tools for the initiative. Ultimately, CHN has a monitoring and evaluation plan that fits the unique needs of their policy work from the district level in Uganda to the G8 Summit.

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ORS tips on implementing the innovative bellwether methodology have just been posted at the American Evaluation Associations website. The post follows up on Joelle Cook's presentation of a Bellwether case study, presented at this year's AEA conference. Bellwether interviews are a great method to objectively assess where advocacy issue are positioned relative to other issues, how decision-makers are thinking and talking about the issue, how likely decision-makers are to act, and what is realistic progress for the advocacy organization. Click here to access documents from the conference presentation. Click here to read a blog post from ORS's Joelle Cook on the methodology.

Organizational Research Services has been working with Tom Kelly of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and a team of colleagues to take a fresh look at measurement approaches in the civic engagement arena. As part of this work, ORS hosted a session "Rethinking Evaluation of Civic Engagement" at the November 2011 American Evaluation Association annual conference. The think tank fostered great discussion among evaluators and funders. For ORS materials, click here. Otherwise, follow this link to the AEA Library to read a summary of the session and download session materials: READ MORE...

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ORS was recently cited in the Grantmakers for Effective Organization's (GEO) publication "Evaluation in Philanthropy - Perspectives from the Field" (see page 28). The publication gives a comprehensive overview of "the current literature on evaluation and learning, [and] outreach to grantmakers that have made these activities a priority." ORS's work with the Medina Foundation was highlighted as "demonstrating that a discrete, relatively small investment in evaluation provides big payoffs." DOWNLOAD

Several ORS team members attended the recent Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2011 KIDS COUNT Conference. where advocacy groups shared their experiences in developing evaluation systems.

At the conference, ORS facilitated a panel called "Measuring Organizational Effectiveness: Putting Evaluation into Action in Your Organization." The panel featured state advocacy organizations that have been developing evaluation systems for their organizations.