For instance, evaluation might be part of the process that a coalition of community members uses to raise their community s capacity for promoting social welfare, reducing crime, or increasing educational opportunity. Evaluation activities might facilitate such community capacity through the benefits of participatory methods and through the use of findings that reveal whether programs and policies are having their intended effects. While undeniably important, this form of capacity is different from the capacity needed to conduct effective evaluation activities in the first place. Keeping this distinction in mind, the sessions at Evaluation 2000 will concentrate on building evaluation capacity with the aim of understanding more about the infrastructure, conditions, and individual ingenuity that allow evaluation to occur and prosper. A complex set of forces must be in place to successfully conduct an evaluation, even one of limited scope.
Motivational forces are the reasons why evaluation happens.
Standards for sound evaluation can also be motivational by challenging those who conduct evaluations to meet or exceed defined standards for success. Factors within organizations that might affect evaluation capacity include the presence of full-time positions for evaluators, ongoing training and professional development in evaluation, missions that include evaluation as a valued priority, and leaders who advocate for doing evaluations and using the findings. Workforce and professional development Workforce and professional development refers to the knowledge, skills, and abilities that people and professionals bring to the evaluation enterprise. A second important group in the evaluation workforce are stakeholders who participate in evaluation activities but who do not identify as professional evaluators. These participating stakeholders bring special talents and perspectives often required to carry out an effective evaluation and thus play a critical role in creating evaluation capacity.