How can governments evaluate their programs and use existing evidence to develop initiatives and policies?

That’s not an easy question to answer, but last week, Results for America (RFA) made a valuable contribution to entities that want to do just that, when it released  its comprehensive and useful  Evaluation Policy Guide, a free e-book. 

The book includes plentiful examples from federal, state, and local governments and also offers a series of exercises for managers who are interested in considering the implication of multiple issues as applied to their own entities. RFA also plans future workshops about the wide variety of topics covered.

As Zachary Markovits, vice president and local practice lead at RFA, told us, “The goal, like a lot of what we do at RFA is take the best practices of how to use evidence and make it really applicable to policy makers, whether in a city, a county, a school district or a state.”

Though the guide’s title refers just to policy, it provides important guidance about the all-too-often ignored province of policy implementation.  

We asked Markovits  what sparked the need for this guide. He explained that the idea originated based on research RFA conducted with Mathematica, focused on American Rescue Plan Act spending that flowed to local governments during the pandemic. That project found many pilot programs resulted from the federal dollars, but that evaluation of those pilots was in short supply. That research led, in turn,  to work on building jurisdictions' evaluation capacity with the MIT-based  Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a global research center that works to reduce poverty by utilizing scientific evidence. and other federal programs.

As Markovits says, “We realized after talking with jurisdictions that there was a need for something more comprehensive about how you launch an evaluation; how you build a sustainable program, and how you do it in a way that confronts the challenges that jurisdictions are facing?” Those challenges include a lack of staff capacity, and the common perception of a lack of time, resources, and expertise. 

The guide is helpful for managers at various levels of sophistication with sections that provide basic information about definitions of evidence, effectiveness. and equity, with others that expand on both policy development and practice -- identifying evaluation opportunities, successfully incorporating community input, avoiding bias and using evaluations to help make funding decisions.

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