Is your nonprofit planning to create your first internal evaluator? By this we mean a dedicated position to lead or manage evaluation inside your organization. We’ve seen these positions called many things – Outcome Managers, Evaluation Directors and Managers, Managers of Program Performance, Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement, Evaluation and Learning Coordinators, etc. Whatever you call it, we are talking about a position dedicated to supporting your organization in thinking evaluatively and employing systematic processes and tools for using a variety of data for measurement, reflection, learning, and improvement. (Read more about how we define evaluation.)
First, let’s celebrate the fact that your organization’s leaders value this work highly enough to make a significant investment in it! (Read five more ways your organization’s leaders can show support for evaluation.) This is still too rare, and it’s usually a sign of your organization’s growth, maturation, or aspirations.
The IllumiLab team and the members of our Community of Practice are or have been the first internal evaluator in our organizations. We have been the first to design and lead this work. We know the challenges and opportunities, and we have learned lessons we want to share. This post includes some considerations and tips to help you craft the right position. Our subsequent posts will share our tips for setting this person up for success and finding the right person to fill the role.
Do You Want a Leader or a Manager?
One of the first questions you should consider is whether you want this internal evaluator to lead or to manage your evaluation work. That’s an important distinction with implications for the how you title the role and situate it in your organizational structure.
Do you need someone to develop an evaluation strategy, design and oversee evaluation infrastructure (tools, plans, software), and lead evaluation practices agency-wide? If so, you are looking for a leader, and we recommend you consider positioning this person as a peer to your most senior department and program leaders.
Or do you need someone to collect and enter data, run reports, conduct analyses, and train and support data collectors? If so, you are looking for an evaluation or data manager. These positions are focused on implementation and execution. We recommend this person be a peer to other managers in other administrative roles (development, accounting, etc.).
If your answer is “We need both!,” you aren’t alone. To fill both roles, we see three common scenarios:
- Task an existing leader with evaluation leadership responsibilities and hire an evaluation manager. Ensure this senior leader has the evaluative knowledge and skills to meaningfully lead and oversee the manager’s work and provide sufficient support to your manager. Then, hire an evaluation manager with the technical and soft skills necessary to implement your evaluation strategies (more on those skills in our next post).
- Hire an evaluation leader and distribute the daily evaluation and data management tasks to existing staff who have the aptitude and capacity for such work, or
- Create two new positions and hire both.
The Bottom Line
Knowing that your organization wants and needs to do more or better evaluation is a great first step, but you need more clarity in order to design a value-adding position. Consider the skills and capacities that you have in-house and how you can leverage and supplement those to not only implement evaluations but build evaluation capacity, use evaluation well, and generate meaningful insights and improvements as a result.