Meeting
European Evaluation Society Conference 2024
Pact is proudly participating in the European Evaluation Society's 2024 conference. Pact's Lauren Serpe, Director of Learning, Evidence and Impact, will be presenting a new instrument for Outcome Harvesting practitioners. The session will take place Sept. 24 at 4:15 Central European time.
About Pact's session
Titled The Outcome Harvesting Enigma: Co-creating a Substantiation Decision-making Tool for the Practitioner Toolbox, Pact's session will be led by Lauren Serpe, who will present a prototype of a new tool co-developed by Pact. Participants will have the opportunity to apply the tool using a real Pact case study. The tool will be the first of its kind, bolstering existing Outcome Harvesting guidance, and will advance MEL practitioners’ ability to conduct high quality, useful Outcome Harvesting studies.
Outcome Harvesting (OH) is a powerful qualitative method that centralizes project participants in telling and analyzing their stories of change. The substantiation step of this method is considered distinct compared to other qualitative methods. It involves third-party/independent individuals to validate outcome and contribution statements made by project participants. Many practitioners have expressed concern about how to execute this step most faithfully to maintain rigor within the limitations of their study.
In the spirit of the conference theme that promotes collaborative thought and action, we will facilitate a Solution Focused/Solution Finding session for participants to provide inputs into a prototype of a tool designed to assist practitioners in implementing this important step of the Outcome Harvesting methodology. Based on inputs from this session, we will update the prototype tool and share with the entire OH Community of Practice (OutcomeHarvesting.net), encouraging practitioners to pilot the tool in their OH studies. The tool design team will then further revise the tool and share a final version for publication.
Presenters
Lauren Serpe, Director, Learning Evidence and Impact, Pact (US)
Karen Biesbrouck, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Lead, Oxfam (Netherlands)
About the conference
The conference theme is "Better Together: Collaborative Thought and Action for Better Evaluation." More information about the EES conference is available on the conference website.