Advocacy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation

Overview

Building on INTRAC’s extensive experience in both monitoring and evaluating (M&E) and in advocacy, this course will support practitioners with how to ensure M&E is integrated into both planning advocacy initiatives and feeding into organisational learning and accountability. The course will focus on a variety of practical ways to meet the challenges of advocacy M&E. The course content draws on real-life case studies from our work in supporting organizations to develop advocacy strategies and from carrying out evaluations of advocacy initiatives. It deals with the challenge of how to assess contribution to change. Finally, it provides a series of practical tools which can help participants to develop and improve the advocacy M&E systems, in accordance with their organization’s capacity and needs.

Objectives of the course

By the end of the training participants will:

• Understand the elements of an advocacy M&E framework or system and the importance of deciding on the purpose of any system that is developed
• Be able to plan advocacy in a way that integrates M&E including defining the change and how that change will happen, and developing realistic indicators and methods of data collection
• Be able to select and use a range of tools for M&E that are most appropriate for the organisational type and the issue
• Understand how to demonstrate and report results
• Have explored their role as agents of change and considered ways of supporting staff and partners with M&E
• Have developed their understanding of the challenges faced in M&E of advocacy and some of the solutions
• Explore how to incorporate learning into monitoring and evaluation, reflecting on different learning practices and key learning questions needed to strengthen advocacy strategies

Intended audience

This course is intended for staff or consultants with some experience of working on advocacy with large and small civil society organizations, who face challenges in monitoring and evaluating advocacy. This training compliments the INTRAC Advocacy and Policy Influencing course which focuses more broadly on developing an advocacy strategy. It is not compulsory to have attended the Advocacy and Policy Influencing course (either as an open training or blended learning course). Participants will be asked to bring a relevant case study which they will have the opportunity to reflect on during the course. The course will attract an international group of practitioners, providing a rich environment for learning and sharing experiences.

Core content areas

• Clarifying different definitions and uses of M&E terms
• Components of good planning for advocacy M&E i.e. setting advocacy objectives and activities that clearly link into M&E indicators
• Clarifying the logic of the campaign/advocacy approach and how this relates to outcomes
• Ensuring that indicators cover outcomes and impact as well as activities
• Deciding on the purpose of your M&E system
• Examples of advocacy M&E systems and case studies including time to reflect on the course input and apply to a real life case study.
•  Quantitative and qualitative data collection methods and tools
• Dealing with contribution and attribution
• Balancing ‘upwards accountability’ to donors and senior management with commitment to improving advocacy impact and accountability to supporters and ‘beneficiaries’ of campaigns and advocacy strategies
• Strategies and tools to help participants to act as ‘agents of change’ within their own organisations
• Action planning on what needs to happen on return to work, to implement the learning from the workshop

Course format

This course has two parts: a 3 day face to face course which will take place in Oxford, UK; and a 50 minute one-to-one coaching session after the course (via Skype) with the course trainer, focusing specifically on your needs.

This individual, tailored coaching will support the individual to apply the learning from the course to their work, and offer the opportunity to work through current challenges, difficulties and opportunities with a highly experienced practitioner. The available dates and times for coaching will be provided by the trainers in advance of the course. Coaching terms and conditions will be provided upon application.

Cost

The cost of this course is £710 non-residential (includes training materials, 50-minute individual coaching session, lunch and refreshments) or £870 residential (includes training materials, 50-minute individual coaching session, meals and accommodation for duration of course).