53 - What Makes a Successful Evaluation Capacity Building Program in Extension?

Abstract Information: There is an increased expectation that Extension transitions from reporting private value of their programs (e.g., outputs and short-term outcomes) to assessing impact and articulating public value of their work. Despite this expectation and push from the leadership, the transition has been gradual. The major factors responsible for this slow shift at extension organizations are (1) limited evaluation skills in county extension educators and specialists, and (2) lack of evaluation specialists or evaluation units dedicated to the Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) of extension professionals and organizations. The situation is exacerbated by budget cuts that have negatively affected the allocation of resources for designing comprehensive ECB programs and hiring evaluation specialists. Evaluation Specialists in several states have annual reporting responsibilities to USDA NIFA in addition to offering evaluation training. In this context, it is essential to build diverse and collaborative teams that can work on ECB training by leveraging unique expertise each member brings to the table. We are one such extension program development and evaluation teams operating at one of the land-grant universities that has built an ECB program in a systematic manner based on needs identified and prioritized from a mixed methods needs assessment study. Our ECB needs assessment study used methods like survey, focus groups, and individual interviews with county extension educators, state level specialists, Extension leadership, and Agriculture Experiment Station faculty, who are the primary stakeholders of our ECB program. We also use systematically documented informal data that comes from one-on-one consultations with extension professionals in the state and ECB literature on an ongoing basis to prioritize the needs identified from the primary data sources. We have built our team over the last seven years and have grown from offering statewide training on three topics to 10 topics now and are in the process of adding one more training from this year. We have adopted different teaching and learning formats like using our state examples in our lecturing followed by a panel with county extension educators and hands-on activities for participants. Our evaluation training has been receiving positive feedback from our end-of-training evaluation surveys, recognition from peers as evidenced from invitations to present at other state extension meetings, and multiple requests for our training videos. Furthermore, the Extension leadership publicly acknowledged that our ECB efforts contributed to securing additional funding for the organization from the state. In addition to the training program, we also extend personalized consultation opportunities to extension professionals to cater to their program-specific evaluation requirements. In this roundtable, we will present the salient findings from our needs assessment study and how we used them to design our ECB program. We will also share the evaluation and academic background of our team members, and how these diverse backgrounds help us in offering training on all the components of the extension program development and evaluation cycle. Following this brief overview, we will facilitate a guided discussion through four questions focused on the core topic of ‘what constitutes a successful Extension ECB program in Extension’?