AEU is the latest offering in Innovation Network’s clearinghouse of advocacy evaluation information and resources. We hope this newsletter will contribute to the advocacy evaluation field by stimulating conversation about provocative and relevant topics, while providing a venue for collaboration and information sharing amongst funders, evaluators, and practitioners. We thank The Atlantic Philanthropies and the Annie E. Casey Foundation for their support of our efforts and for funding the newsletter.

For those of us working on advocacy and public policy initiatives as evaluators, funders and advocates these past couple of years—and particularly 2006—have been extremely exciting. In the past year alone, a number of major initiatives and events have catalyzed the field:

The debut of Innovation Network’s own Advocacy Evaluation Resource Center
The formation of the Advocacy and Public Policy Evaluation Topical Interest Group (TIG) at the American Evaluation Association (AEA)
Publication of the latest issue of The Evaluation Exchange from The Harvard Family Research Project, which focused on advocacy and public policy evaluation from The Harvard Family Research Project, which focused on advocacy and public policy evaluation
Formation of a core funders group (including The California Endowment, The Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation) who are long term supporters of advocacy
The launch of Continuous Progress, another web-based resource and information center created by the Global Interdependence Initiative of the Aspen Institute.

These events have sparked lively conversation at conferences and convenings in terms of both understanding the current climate in the advocacy evaluation field and applying these learnings to chart its potential growth. Ultimately, recognizing the impact of advocacy evaluation offers an exciting opportunity to enhance activities dedicated to creating significant social change.

Clearly, there is an unprecedented eagerness in the field to share knowledge, produce new tools and methodologies, and promote learning and capacity. Therefore, we believe that the development of advocacy evaluation will not only benefit advocates, but will ultimately support service organizations whose advocacy work is less direct.

In short, this is a thrilling and fast-moving time for advocacy evaluation, and we hope to build on that excitement to benefit the greater nonprofit community.

~Lily