Позитивные изменения, Том 3 №1, 2023. Positive changes. Volume 3, Issue 1 (2023)

“The PROOCENKU Club is an ongoing online discussion platform for anyone interested in evaluation. The Club’s slogan goes as follows: “An interesting conversation in a good company.” The Club’s mission is to support a community of practitioners dedicated to integrating evaluation into the work of socially oriented organizations. Nothing is required to participate in the meetings, other than the desire. Education, level of training in evaluation, and practical experience are not important.”[31]

PRINCIPLES OF SELF-EVALUATION OF NGO PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS

ASPPE has developed and published a number of important works on the professional development of professional evaluators. These include the Principles of Program and Policy Evaluation (ASPPE, 2017).

Professional principles are born out of practice and determine how members of the profession should behave in situations of difficult choices. Principles cannot be invented before real experience has been accumulated: it is a natural evolutionary process. When a profession reaches a certain level of maturity and a professional community (association) has been established, that community comes together to agree on the principles. Therefore, the principles of program and policy evaluation adopted by ASPPE are important not only as guidelines for action, but also as evidence of the emerging evaluation profession in Russia.

These principles are designed to take into account the fact that, generally, three parties can participate in the evaluation:

• The Customer is a representative of the organization that initiates the evaluation, orders the task to be implemented, and will be the main user of the evaluation results.

• An evaluator – a specialist hired by the Customer to perform the evaluation.

• Evaluation participants – the people who provide the information for the evaluation; these are usually employees or managers of the programs being evaluated (ASPPE, 2017).

Figure 1. Self-evaluation: three in one

ASPPE suggests that evaluation must be guided by the following principles:

1. Focus on practical use of the results.

2. Competence of the performers.

3. Appropriate methodology.

4. Transparency.

5. Safety.

6. Flexibility.

The “general case,” for which ASPPE principles were developed, is an external evaluation (see Figure 1).

A program (project) self-evaluation is the systematic collection of information about the activities of the program (project), its characteristics and outcomes, which is performed by the program (project) team to make judgments about the program (project), improve the effectiveness of the program (project), and/or inform decisions about future programming. The difference between this definition and the generic definition given at the beginning of the article is all in the italicized text: here, everything is done by the project team itself. The people implementing the project also set the evaluation task, plan the evaluation, collect the data (while also serving as important sources of information), analyze the data, formulate the evaluation results, and use them – all on their own. It turns out that in self-evaluation, the project team acts as the customer, the contractor, and the evaluation participants (see Figure 1).

Do the ASPPE evaluation principles apply in a self-evaluation situation?

We had a series of discussions on this issue as part of the 2022 PROOCENKU Club meetings[32]. They were attended by more than 40 people, mostly coming from non-profit organizations from many regions of Russia.

The outcome of these discussions can be summarized as follows:

1. The evaluation principles proposed by ASPPE are applicable to NGO self-evaluation.

2. Short definitions of these principles also apply to the self-evaluation situation.

3. However, recommendations for the use of these principles in self-evaluation practice require significant adjustment and simplification.

We have developed and discussed guidelines for a self-evaluation situation. This is how the Principles of Self-Evaluation of NGO Programs and Projects have appeared (PROOCENKU Alliance, 2023). These principles, with recommendations for their application, are presented below. I believe it can be useful to any NGO, regardless of its specialization.

Principle 1. Focus on practical use of the results.

The whole self-evaluation process should be focused on getting information that is useful to you.

Recommendations:

• You need to be as specific as possible as to why you are doing self-evaluation. Think carefully and discuss the scope of work for self-evaluation. Formulate the questions you want answered, and discuss who will use those answers and how.