The idea is simple. Start a program, gather information on whether it’s working or not and, depending on what you find, change what you are doing or do more of the same. In practice though, it is hard to do well.

USIP staff, through all of their research, field visits, consultations, and more formal monitoring and evaluation, have always worked to make their projects better based on the feedback they gather. These efforts were a good start, but in the past several years it has become clear that we needed to get more systematic about how we gather evidence in order to make better decisions about programming.

To help address this problem, I became USIP’s first Director of Learning and Evaluation in February 2012. Although I immediately began supporting individual programs’ evaluation efforts, it was clear from the beginning that a statement of USIP’s commitment to evaluation at the organizational level was needed. As a result, I began an inclusive process, eventually involving over 100 staff members at the Institute, to develop the United States Institute of Peace Evaluation Policy [PDF].

In addition to the internal consultations, I sought to have the policy reflect the current state-of-the art by drawing on the recently-released USAID and State Department Evaluation Policies and similar documents by the United Nations, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services and others. The policy was finalized and released this month.

Perhaps the most important element is the new requirement that all programs over $10,000 include an explicit strategy for monitoring and evaluation, including clearly articulated objectives and indicators that will be used to assess whether those objectives are being met. In addition, the policy sets out a commitment to learn from the monitoring and evaluation we do to inform future decisions.

In addition to articulating specific requirements, the policy describes the unique challenges of evaluation at USIP, the purposes and uses of evaluation, what is expected of each department, and what principles USIP will hold itself to in regard to all of its evaluation activities. The principles include a commitment to honesty and transparency, to building local capacity through our evaluation efforts, to ensuring that evaluations are relevant and useful, and to being creative and adaptive in addressing USIP’s unique evaluation challenges.

All of this is designed to help USIP have a greater impact, make programming decisions based on evidence, inform the broader peacebuilding field, and hold ourselves accountable to the communities where we work, to our partners, and most importantly to our ultimate funders, U.S. taxpayers. In the end of course, the policy is just a document. It will only have meaning if it creates real progress on monitoring and evaluation within the Institute. There have been some promising early signs. Just after the policy was released, for instance, I met with the Afghanistan program team during their strategic planning retreat. At that meeting we cemented plans for how I would collaborate with the country director as well as the newly-hired monitoring and evaluation officer in Kabul to improve their monitoring and evaluation within the framework of the policy.

Through the expectations it lays out, the policy is also providing an important impetus to USIP’s efforts to monitor the impact of its analytic work, including policy research, working groups and publications. In regard to these processes and others, it is clear that the policy is doing its job – by setting clear expectations and a clear framework within which programs will work to fulfill those expectations. So as I said, a positive start, but it would be great to hear from others about their experiences.

How have you leveraged policies like this to create real, positive change within your organization? Send us your comment below or reach me directly at ablum@usip.org.

Andrew Blum is director of learning and evaluation at USIP.