Global Humanitarian Partnership Evaluation for Laudes Foundation

To evaluate the 1st Global Humanitarian partnership between the Laudes Foundation (former C&A Foundation), C&A and Save the Childre we pioneered the Whole Person Approach (WPA) in an evaluation context.

The WPA was used in all the phases of the project: from proposal writing to the evaluation design, delivery, results and the final phase of an “evaluation of the evaluation”.

One of the implications of using the WPA was a focus on people and an increase in the time evaluators and evaluatees spent together.

The dark brown boxes in the figure below show different phases from “traditional” evaluations.

Ilan Vuddamalay, Programme Manager at Laudes Foundation, knows how easy it is for evaluation reports to be put on the shelf and fall into oblivion. In this video, she talks about how the Whole Person Approach (WPA) made the evaluation report come to life after the evaluation (and even during it).

She describes how people internalised the findings even before the report was published and how everyone who was part of the evaluation got something out of it.

Ilan believes that traditional evaluators need to learn from the WPA. Watch the video to know why!

Josephine Hetherington, former Project Manager at Adam Smith International (ASI), is used to managing problematic projects, with difficult clients and independent consultants who sometimes fail to deliver.

In this video interview, she describes how using the Whole Person Approach (WPA) helped the evaluation to be one of her most enjoyable projects ever!

Watch the video to learn how by the end, WPA made people feel different about the evaluation, and how they interacted as a team and provided insights that we would not otherwise have had.

We believe that learning does not happen by reading a report. But, there is no way out and we wrote a report too. However, besides the “traditional” written report, we wanted to do something else…

So, we have piloted reporting the results from the Brazil case study (annexe IV of the full report) in the form of animation. We did not get it quite right the first time around. So we produced a shorter animation.

The icing on the cake: all of these are public. The Laudes Foundation shows leadership amongst corporate foundations and published the evaluation results in full!!! Scroll down and follow the links to dive deep into the media products generated!

Innovating with Animation to Present Evaluation Findings

In our commitment to create new ways of working, we have piloted the use of animation to talk about the results of the Global Humanitarian Partnership in Brazil. We did not get it quite right, but we tried! Continue reading→

Only leaders publish their corporate evaluation results

While publishing evaluation reports is a common practice for international aid programmes financed by governments, it is rare in the case of corporate foundations. We hope other corporate aid programmes will follow the Laudes Foundation’s example of best practice. Continue reading→

Pushing the Boundaries of Report Writing

Writing evaluation reports can be as daunting as reading them! With the information collected by three consultants, in more than 130 stakeholders interviews, over ten focus group discussions (FGDs), field visits to four countries and virtual country engagement, to summarize it all in a user-friendly way is a challenge. Continue reading→

One of the main reasons we were selected amongst almost 30 other proposals to carry out this evaluation was because our proposal focused on people and on the relationship between people. This was thanks to the inclusion of the Whole Person Approach (WPA) in the proposal.

Yet, describing what the WPA is without sounding cheesy and wishy-washy is hard.

During the delivery of the evaluation, both team members and the client group were sceptical of WPA’s effectiveness. We always had to have a plan B, just in case the WPA would not work. I was always confident we would not need to resort to our plan B, and we didn’t.

However, we felt the constant pressure to prove the WPA would work at every step of the evaluation. So it is time to share more widely how it feels and why it works. In the videos below team members express how it was for them to use the Whole Person Approach in this project.

Laura Somoggi, Sustainability, Cross-sector Partnerships and Women’s Empowerment Expert is one of the people we have an immediate connection with.

We have known her for many years, and we had the pleasure of working together with her during this evaluation.

In this video, she shares her experience in using the Whole Person Approach (WPA) for the first time and how it has put her out of her comfort zone.

Having a final workshop without PowerPoint was no way easy for someone who is used to corporate structures and ways of working.

Watch the video to hear more on how Laura felt the WPA was liberating.