Can we build a web-platform to support the evaluation of chronic disease prevention programming? Will anyone want to use it or fund it? These were the questions I was thinking about as I was considering taking a job with The CAPTURE Project. But both David and Diane’s conviction that it can be done and that people will want it and the way they both “lived” the values and culture of servant leadership and systems thinking were enough to convince me to jump into this project. In a subsequent blog I hope to expand on Jasmine’s servant leadership article to talk specifically about how The CAPTURE Project is bringing these ideas to life in its own organizational development as well as using it to guide its external engagements.
I had spent most of my evaluation career trying to do evaluations in a way that would give something back to the people I was working with and for. I strongly believed in evaluation capacity building (see Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations by Hallie Preskill and Rosalie T. Torres and published by Sage Publications in 1998) and involving program participants and program managers in the design and conduct of evaluations. I did not want to do what I called “drive-by” evaluations, where an outside evaluator comes into a project, conducts the evaluation and leaves nothing but a report behind.
I saw CAPTURE as a way to expand the reach of evaluation capacity building efforts. If we designed an easy to use system, then any practitioner or program manager with access to the internet could log onto the system, describe their intervention and obtain a number of data collection tools for outcome evaluation, data capture and reporting. The more the system was used, the more data would be available on what works, for whom, in what contexts. Not only would we make evaluation accessible and easier, we would be creating a repository of findings that would be useful for program planning, policy, and research. CAPTURE also was of interest to me because it would become a mechanism for knowledge transfer and exchange, and ultimately support evidence-informed decision making.
This was enough to draw me into the project, but not eliminate my doubts about being able to build it or sustain it. Not long after I started, a colleague sent me a publication called Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact. This publication did it. It showed that CAPTURE-like systems (what they called shared measurement platforms) do exist, practitioners use them, and others value them so much that they fund them. FSG Social Impact Advisors reviewed a number of these systems, most of which have been developed within the past 3 to 5 years. As none of them addressed chronic disease prevention interventions, I was reassured that CAPTURE would be filling a need.
This publication also detailed what is needed to create such systems and showed me that The CAPTURE Project has these ingredients: we have strong leadership and a far reaching vision, we have multi-year financial backing from the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, and we have the right approach in working with existing initiatives and practitioners. We are positioned to create a system that will enable evaluation capacity building writ large but we will need your help to succeed.
