For a long time, I prioritized program participants, because I thought, without participants there would be no program. Now, drawing on the voices of staff (as well as my personal experiences as a staff member), I recognize that there’s a stronger need for balancing the perspectives of both staff and program participants.

As a result, I prioritize speaking directly to staff who oversee the programs I’m evaluating, and they clue me in to three important factors:

• How the program is supposed to run
• How the program actually runs
• How they really feel about the program

Staff play an integral role in the success of your programming. As they experience the day-to-day compared to leadership, staff should be positioned to bring up concerns AND feel supported in the process. Yet, staff voices are often deprioritized to amplify the expectations of funders, program participants, and other stakeholders.

During a recent project, my project partner and I conducted qualitative interviews with community experts to support a foundation’s strategic investments. Using the interviews and a robust literature review, we drafted a field-driven theory of change. After presenting the theory of change to the community experts, we developed a training with foundation staff who were expected to implement the theory of change’s recommended interventions.

Before the training, we administered a pre-training assessment to assess staff’s general understanding of theories of change, and this specific theory of change. We learned:

You know your community better than your funder, and your programs are only successful when staff feel supported and have the capacity to do their jobs.

Your staff knows your programs so much in fact, that when you report to your board of directors or engage new funders, you rely heavily on them to provide details of the nuances of a program that warrants more funding and other forms of support.

As we know, sometimes programs are created in response to a variety of influential factors, including why programs are evaluated. Stakeholder needs (particularly ones with the most power) are a major factor.

One of my first consulting projects was the evaluation of a popular leadership program in New York City. I conducted several site visits to observe the participants and facilitators, administered the program survey and conducted focus groups.

Involving the staff in the evaluation (outside of getting logistic assistance from them) wasn’t on a radar until I started paying attention to their conversations with each other. In particular, conversations around the actual program.

The program’s main location was located in Manhattan, while this program site was in a different borough. I decided to speak more to the staff about their perspectives on this program, its location, and the intricate details that went into running it.

The program’s new site was chosen due to local landscape analysis (wanting to choose an area that didn’t have a program of this kind). This location ran concurrently with the Manhattan location and was chosen to test if the program could be replicated in another borough, provide more community-focused curriculum, and deliver the same level impact for participants living in this borough in comparison to the Manhattan site (which had participants from all five boroughs).

While participants enjoyed having the program in their community (it allowed them to travel less, plus they were able to connect more with local borough residents), what I got from the conversations with staff was that they were frustrated. It had been difficult engaging the local community, from knowing where local resources were from the tiring travel back and forth between all of the sites for this program (including the sites located outside of New York City).

When I brought this up with the executive director, I was informed that a key factor that determined the new site’s location was at the request of a funder, who saw the area as “up and coming” and wanted the organization to capitalize on it.

I knew how problematic this was, and using a landscape analysis as justification was just as problematic. Despite being an external evaluator, I felt that I didn’t have the power to advocate for the staff.