Outsourced expertise
Engaged on retainer or contract
Specialists with deep methodological or domain knowledge, available when a project needs them and not carried as overhead when it doesn't.
Our Model
Why evaluation costs what it costs, and what we changed.
The structure
Affordability and coordination are the same problem.
The obstacles to accessible evaluation fall along two lines that turn out to be connected. The first is price. The second is coordination — of people, methods, tools, documentation and expertise, all of which get rebuilt from scratch on nearly every engagement in this field.
Solving the second relieves the first. When methods are reusable, when data infrastructure is shared rather than rented per project, when specialist expertise can be drawn on for the hours it is needed rather than retained full-time, the marginal cost of an engagement falls sharply. Ascent is designed around that arithmetic. What those efficiencies buy is not margin. It is time — the long-horizon, embedded support that the evidence says actually works, at a price the organizations in question can pay.
How the work is staffed
Four layers, each doing what it is best positioned to do.
In-house analytics
Internal, recurring capacity
The work that recurs across nearly every engagement: data analysis, instrument design, program design and measurement.
Implementation support
The largest full-time function
The primary liaison between analysts and the program team. Implementation support professionals translate findings into actionable changes and shepherd them through the organization, so what the evaluation produces actually lands.
Clients
Embedded with the team
Implementation staff collaborate on what the organization needs and on how change actually gets made inside it.
Why the implementation layer is the innovation. An implementation support professional's expertise is holistic appraisal — of the organization's needs, the community's needs, and the methods most likely to make new knowledge and practice stick. They translate findings into feasible program changes and shepherd those changes through the organization, with attention to its resources, its power dynamics and its outcomes. The role is grounded in the Collaborative for Implementation Practice's Implementation Support Practitioner Profile and Practice Guide. No existing model applies that evidence, explicitly and measurably, to evaluation capacity building.
Impact logic
More than evaluation consulting. Beyond capacity building.
The program reaches deeper into an organization than evaluation consulting does, and it is far more participatory, on both sides, than typical capacity-building models. Each step below directly affects the one after it.
01
Evaluation
Establishes the systems and standards for recursive improvement, and the baseline measurements that change is rated against.
Led by Ascent. Our interventions are measured here.
02
Programs
Evaluation results inform program changes, and drive improvements in implementation fidelity and measurability.
Led by Ascent, evaluated in its own recursive process.
03
Outcomes
The program team defines implementation strategies from the recommendations, and reports results, roadblocks and community concerns.
Led by the program team. Uptake is measured here.
04
Recursion and integration
Builds cross-cutting improvement strategies from the independent results at each step, then feeds them into the next cycle.
Where evaluation is connected to final outcomes.
| Intervention | What it does | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded implementation support | An implementation support professional works inside the program team for the whole engagement, converting analytic outputs into changes calibrated to its resources and learning needs. | Time embedded; meetings and workshops; uptake and sustained change in usage and learning |
| Evaluation pipeline delivery | Phases 1 to 3 of the pipeline, the first time through and on every revisit, passing directly into recursion and integration. | Deliverable timelines and quality; grant applications and funder requests supported; client satisfaction |
| Recursion and integration | The continuing process that turns evaluation into program change, and traces the causal chain from our support to the final program outcomes. | Final program outcomes, read through the chain from support and uptake to practice changes to outcomes |
Why recursion and integration exists. Studies of existing models find a weak connection between evaluation-based services and final program outcomes. Recursion and integration is how this program tries to strengthen it: tracing each evaluation cycle through to its effect on downstream outcomes, turning what the implementation supporter learns about the organization into metrics, and running evaluation as a continuing cycle rather than a one-off. Its results also change how we deliver the work, which keeps the practice accountable to outcomes rather than to deliverables.
Evidence
This is not an aesthetic preference.
Evaluation capacity building — building an organization's own skill in program evaluation, rather than simply performing an evaluation for it — has a twenty-year research literature behind it. Early findings on its effectiveness were mixed. The more recent studies, of more developed practice with longer time horizons and persistent engagement, are markedly more encouraging.
- A two-year cluster-randomized trial of a capacity-building intervention found dose-dependent gains across four capacity scales among users, with the greatest improvement associated with the most technical assistance hours (Acosta, Chinman et al., 2013).
- A replication trial found no significant effects on proximal outcomes in year one, but small significant improvement after a second-year quality improvement cycle (Chinman, Acosta et al., 2018).
- A qualitative study of sustained evaluation practice found that practice persisted years after the intervention, and attributed that persistence to ongoing evaluator contact rather than to the initial training (Wade & Kallemeyn, 2020).
- Instrument validation work established that organizational leadership, support, resources and learning climate condition whether individual knowledge and motivation ever translate into mainstreamed practice (Taylor-Ritzler et al., 2013).
Read together, these findings say something specific: duration, dose and relationship are the operative variables, and the organizational conditions around the individual determine whether anything sticks. Existing service models — fees-for-service, fixed terms, engagements bounded by discrete deliverables — undermine every one of those variables. Ascent's structure is an attempt to build a model that does not.
Model benefits
What the structure produces
Six things follow from staffing the work this way rather than the usual way.
Consistency
Consistency enriches context, context builds trust, and trust drives absorption. Models built on fixed terms and discrete deliverables break that chain at the first link.
Data and tools
An institutional hub can build a repository of data and analytical tools that no independent contractor can afford to access, and can create proprietary methods that individual practitioners have no means to build.
People
A small full-time team manages evaluation pipelines through a network of contractors and experts, so the most relevant skills get applied to each task at the lowest cost.
Service
A large segment of organizations is priced out of evaluation regardless of how much it would benefit them. Reaching that segment raises the quality of programs serving thousands of people.
Community
A nonprofit that draws revenue from a consultancy practice has no incentive to guard its methods. That makes shared knowledge across the sector possible.
Position
In the taxonomy of nonprofit infrastructure organizations Ascent is an intermediary — serving the sector, other nonprofits and local communities, and using that scope to do better work in each.
Ascent aims to be a development partner delivering developmental consulting on a structural program's cost base. That combination is usually treated as a tradeoff. Our position is that the tradeoff is a product of consulting-firm economics rather than a law of the work — and that an optimized analytics layer can subsidize a customized relationship layer.
The network
Who does this work
Four roles carry every engagement. We are naming the roles before we name the people, because the structure is the claim.
Inside the organization
- Project lead. Signs off on every phase deliverable before it is released.
- Implementation support professional. The organization's continuous point of contact, responsible for turning findings into changes it can actually make.
- In-house analyst. Design, measurement and analysis work that recurs across engagements.
Around it
- Outside specialist. Methodologists and domain experts engaged per project, for the hours a project needs them.
Plain definitions
Evaluation capacity building. Building an organization's own ability to conduct and use evaluation, rather than performing one for it.
Implementation science. The study of what makes evidence-based practices actually take hold in real organizations.
Process use. Learning and change that come from taking part in an evaluation, separate from its findings.
“Technical assistance improves organizational capacity and program fidelity far more reliably than it improves outcomes for the people served. The translation layer is the bottleneck.”
The model only matters if organizations can buy it.
See what the four phases actually produce.