The Organisations: The Australian Volunteers Program invites people from all walks of life to participate in Australia’s aid program through skilled volunteering in 26 countries across the Indo-Pacific. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has funded their longstanding and deep partnership with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). This partnership has built and embedded innovation within the work of the program, including in countries where new and better localised innovations are being developed and implemented to improve humanitarian aid and development initiatives.
Why evaluating partnership matters: Continuously learning from our experiences and demonstrating value are challenging to do, but essential to building better partnerships that affect greater change. As a partnership’s reach and aspiration grows, evaluation ensures partnerships remain meaningful to those they serve, and responsive to the complex and continually shifting context in which they operate.
How we helped: Our work sought to understand how working in partnership to embed innovation had impacted the ways the partners have adapted their approaches to their core business in multi-country settings – this involved:
- designing an agreed pathway for evaluating the partnership program, including examining elements of implementation, outcomes, and influence
- deploying a mixed-methods evaluation
- quantitative and qualitative analysis of findings as per agreed evaluation questions and areas of interest
- developing internal and external reporting products with key considerations for the partnership to take through into their next phase of work