I am Dr. Angelica Thompson (she/her), Founder & CEO of Data Works, Inc., an applied research and evaluation consulting firm that helps organizations use data, evaluation, and strategic insight to improve outcomes and drive meaningful impact.

Organizations often talk about inclusion as a value, but employees experience inclusion through action, culture, and feelings of belonging. One of the most meaningful ways organizations can foster a sense of belonging is through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or Employee Interest Groups (EIGs).

Lessons Learned

At their best, ERGs are far more than social groups or symbolic initiatives; they create intentional spaces where employees can connect through shared identities, experiences, and goals while helping organizations better understand and support the people who make up their workforce.

Employees perform at their best when they feel psychologically safe, respected, and seen. Yet Gallup research has found that only 20% of employees strongly agree that they feel connected to their organization’s culture. That means that most employees are showing up to work without a strong sense of belonging or connection.

For LGBTQ+ employees in particular, the stakes can be even higher. Research shows that approximately one-third of LGBTQ+ professionals report feeling exhausted from hiding or masking aspects of their identity in the workplace. Nearly 40% have also experienced workplace harassment or discrimination at some point in their careers. When employees do not feel safe enough to show up authentically, organizations not only lose employee morale but also trust, engagement, creativity, collaboration, and retention.

People should not have to compartmentalize who they are to succeed professionally. ERGs help address that gap by creating community and visibility within organizations. They provide spaces where employees can share experiences, mentor one another, discuss challenges, celebrate culture, and build meaningful support systems. For many employees, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, simply knowing they are not alone can significantly improve their workplace experience.

But the value of ERGs extends beyond individual belonging. These groups can also serve as powerful organizational partners. Employees closest to a particular community often have important insights about workplace culture, policies, communication practices, recruitment, retention, accessibility, and customer/client experiences. ERGs create structured pathways for organizations to hear these perspectives directly, rather than making assumptions about what employees or communities need.

ERGs also create opportunities for employees to grow as leaders, advocates, and change agents. Employees often gain experience in strategic planning, facilitation, mentorship, and organizational advocacy through their involvement in these groups. In turn, organizations benefit from stronger leadership pipelines and more engaged employees.

However, ERGs cannot thrive without meaningful organizational support. Inclusion work should not rest solely on the shoulders of employees volunteering their emotional labor. Leadership buy-in, visibility, dedicated resources, and a willingness to act on employee feedback are essential. Employees need to see that their voices are not only welcomed but also valued enough to influence change.

As workplaces continue evolving, organizations have a responsibility to create environments where employees can show up fully as themselves while helping shape stronger, more inclusive cultures.

Hot Tips

If your organization does not currently have an ERG or EIG, consider advocating for one! Start conversations, build community, and identify shared needs and opportunities for support. Change often begins with employees willing to speak up and create space for others to feel seen, heard, and valued.

Belonging is not a workplace luxury. It is foundational to healthy organizations, effective leadership, and sustainable impact.

Rad Resources

• What Percentage of Employees Feel Connected to Their Workplace Culture?
• Over Half of LGBTQ+ Americans Are Bisexual. Many Don’t Feel Safe Being Out at Work

The American Evaluation Association is hosting LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

I’m Eric Barela (he/him): Senior Consultant with Raya Cooper Impact Consulting, 26-year AEA member, cisgender gay Chicano male, and someone who splits his time between the US and South Africa. I’ve decided to scale back my AEA involvement this year to get to know the evaluation context in South Africa and the African continent. Below are a few things I have learned since I arrived.

Lessons Learned

Made in Africa Evaluation Practice

Something that has really struck me is how African evaluators have their own scholarship to draw upon. Over the past 25 years, Africa has been creating their own knowledge about what works best for their context. The African Evaluation Principles started as an adaptation of the Program Evaluation Standards. As of 2021, these Principles guide practice in a way that works for the African context. I’m also learning about the 2025 Made in Africa evaluation framework, which seeks to shift the evaluation landscape by focusing on decolonization, indigenization, and contextuality.

Shut Up and Listen!

I have now been in multiple interactions with evaluators from all over the world who, upon finding out I’m American, make it clear to me that they DO NOT want me to bring my American-ness to the conversation. Regardless of how we might think we carry ourselves, many see us as Americans first, evaluators second. I approach my learning with humility. I am a guest in their context and it’s on me to learn how things work here.

Find Friends

In our learning journeys, it’s often helpful to find kindred spirits to show us the ropes. I have made friends with another gay male evaluator from the US who has lived in Kenya for 15+ years. We talk about the similarities and differences of evaluation practice in various contexts, and our conversations go far beyond that. We compare notes on food, culture, music, husbands, etc. It’s great to have a fellow traveler to talk to about what I’m learning and how it expands my knowledge base.

Conference Travel Consideration

Both the AEA and the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) 2026 conferences are scheduled for November. Given that it’s much cheaper for me to stay on the continent, I’ve decided to skip the AEA conference (for the first time in 26 years!) and possibly attend the AfrEA conference. Of the 63 UN member states where homosexuality is criminalized by law, 33 are in Africa. This year’s conference is held in Morocco, where consensual same-sex activity is punishable by fines and prison time. As a new student of Made in Africa evaluation, I want to attend. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I gotta ask myself some serious questions. Should I visit a country where I’m criminalized for who I love? Will it be safe for me to bring along my husband? If I submit a proposal that’s eventually accepted, do I attend or do I tell the organizers why I’ve decided not to attend? Would this be bringing my American-ness into the conversation?

More to Come!

There is still so much for me to learn about the African evaluation context! I plan to share more in future posts.

Rad Resources

• African Evaluation Principles (2021) Evaluation guidelines rooted in and tailored for African contexts and knowledge systems.
• Made in Africa Evaluation Handbook (2025): Framework redefining evaluation practice by centering African epistemologies, values, and methodologies.
• Bang the Drum! For Monitoring and Evaluation in Africa by Mark Abrahams: AEA365 blog highlighting African M&E practice.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

As impact investing expands within philanthropy, evaluators are increasingly asked to adapt traditional L&E approaches to new decision-making contexts. For CHF, this meant designing an integrated L&E and Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) approach that operates across a range of investment vehicles and priority areas for its Program-Related Investments portfolio.

What we did

We focused on building infrastructure to support ongoing learning across teams. This required translating familiar evaluation tools into a context where capital deployment, cross-team collaboration, and systems-level outcomes are central to how impact is created. Read more in the retrospective Look Back Report, capturing the evolution of impact investing from experimentation to an integrated strategy for advancing health equity.

What we learned

1. L&E can serve as the integrator across philanthropic functions.

At CHF, impact investing was already integrated with program teams, but lacked an L&E approach that could extend across both grants and investments. The L&E framework helped fill that gap by creating a shared theory of change, shared outcome language, and aligned learning questions across functions. 

This repositioned evaluation from a grant-focused support function to a strategic tool for connecting how different forms of capital work together to enable more coordinated decision-making.

2. Impact comes together at the portfolio level—not deal by deal.

Traditional IMM approaches often focus on outputs tied to individual deals and reporting requirements. But CHF’s experience showed that impact investing works through the combined and reinforcing use of different forms of capital, integrated with grants, over time. Different tools play distinct roles at different moments, with capital intentionally matched to partner needs. By defining 12 portfolio-level outcomes (e.g., wealth building, power shifting, community assets), the team created a shared language to understand how these efforts contribute to long-term systems change.

3. Start with shared outcomes, then build metrics and reporting around them.

Rather than beginning with available data or standard indicators, CHF grounded measurement in its theory of change and defined a set of portfolio-level outcomes aligned with its impact investing directives. From there, metrics and reporting approaches were developed to reflect how change actually happens across the portfolio. 

4. Partner insight is critical to making the framework work.

We complemented internal data with surveys of investee partners to understand how investments were contributing to outcomes in practice. This helped validate assumptions and ground the framework in partner experience, not just internal definitions of success. Since defining metrics, we worked closely with investees to ensure data collection was feasible, relevant, and not overly burdensome—aligning with data they already collect and report.

Hot Tip

When evaluating impact investing, start with your portfolio-level theory of change, not individual deals. This shifts your focus from attribution (“Did this investment lead to intended results and returns?”) to contribution (“What is this portfolio making possible?”) and allows you to better capture how capital influences systems over time.

Closing Reflection

Applying L&E to impact investing is less about new tools and more about adapting existing ones. Theories of change, outcomes, and learning agendas still apply—but must be reoriented to portfolios, capital flows, and systems-level change. For evaluators, this requires designing approaches that capture contribution across investments, integrate multiple forms of data, and remain useful for decision-making—not just reporting. As IMM evolves, evaluators play an important role to ensure rigor and real-world use.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

What’s an Entrepreneur Support Organization (ESO)?

ESOs provide the infrastructure that helps entrepreneurs start, sustain, and grow their businesses. They offer a range of support such as education and mentorship, access to capital, technical assistance, peer networks, and help with navigating administrative barriers. ESOs often provide the only accessible pathway to entrepreneurship for people who face systemic barriers to resources such as credit, capital, technical skills, and professional networks.

Unlike many traditional business accelerators that require an ownership stake or equity in the entrepreneurs’ ventures, mission-driven ESOs focus on community impact and equitable access to opportunity rather than financial return. They see entrepreneurship as a way to build wealth in communities that face systemic barriers to financial success.

What typical metrics leave behind

Most current guidance for the measurement of entrepreneurship and businesses is skewed toward a narrow set of financial indicators, such as annual revenue, staff size, and debt-to-income ratio. This limited viewpoint is mirrored in guidance for ESOs, which are encouraged to prioritize serving the largest number of entrepreneurs at the lowest cost, and the speed with which businesses repay their loans.

In our experience, these metrics-as-usual miss the real story of ESOs and the entrepreneurs they support. In some communities, success means stabilizing small family-run businesses that sustain local culture; in others, it may mean preserving the variety of local businesses. In communities of color and communities facing economic disinvestment, success may also mean reclaiming ownership of neighborhood assets, strengthening social capital, or resisting displacement through community-rooted entrepreneurship.

A more holistic view of ESOs

We recommend that ESOs use a mix of indicators, including entrepreneurial ecosystem metrics such as diversity of capital sources and network connectivity, as well as inclusive entrepreneurship indicators like the share of women- or BIPOC-owned businesses supported. Personal financial wellbeing metrics, such as changes in debt levels, savings, or credit scores, provide insight into individual outcomes, while community level indicators like local job retention and business survival during downturns help capture broader systemic effects. 

ESOs can further strengthen their story of impact by tracking more locally- and contextually-rooted measures such as the diversity of business ownership or entrepreneurs’ sense of belonging and self-efficacy. Together, these measures offer a more complete picture of impact that honors both individual progress and collective resilience.

Enhance rigor through co-creating success metrics

Co-design evaluation metrics with ESOs and entrepreneurs to ensure that measures of success accurately reflect their goals for their own companies, rather than presuming that financial return is all that they value. Partnering directly with entrepreneurs from historically marginalized backgrounds in the design of metrics helps ensure that evaluation frameworks reflect their lived experience and community definitions of success. This approach recognizes that entrepreneurs closest to these challenges hold the expertise to define what success means and how it should be measured.

Hot Tip

Use personas and journey maps to help identify the ways that different entrepreneurs define success and connect outcomes for themselves and their businesses.

Rad Resources

Check out our full brief on Understanding and Measuring the Impact of ESOs on our website here and join our free webinar on July 23^rd, 2026 at 10am Pacific! We’ll share links to data collection tools we created for ESOs and more. Click here to learn more and register.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

In my work in climate finance, I’ve often seen investors, strategists and decision-makers overwhelmed with data vertigo. We have dozens of frameworks, hundreds of metrics, and a mountain of reports, yet I still hear investors asking: Are we actually moving the needle? How can I tell if the investment is having an impact?

In my experience, the lack of a cohesive “how-to” guide can be a roadblock to impact investing. That’s why, with other practitioners from the Climate SMILE (Strategy, Monitoring, Impact, Learning, and Evaluation) Community of Practice and  Prime Coalition, we wanted to build something practical. We didn’t want another dense academic paper full of theory and abstract concepts. We wanted a map that would help practitioners navigate easily and quickly.

The result is the Climate Impact Investing IMM Playbook. Developed over 18 months with input from a broad range of practitioners across the field, the Playbook is designed to provide a user-friendly, practical roadmap that supports impact measurement and learning across the entire investment lifecycle.

Lessons Learned: Moving beyond mitigation

For a long time, I’ve seen “climate impact” treated as almost synonymous with carbon mitigation and emissions reduction. But in working with other practitioners to develop this Playbook, I came to see how strongly the community wanted to elevate other critical dimensions—particularly social and environmental considerations, and adaptation.

While mitigation metrics are relatively well established, my experience is that, to truly tackle the climate crisis, our evaluation frameworks still need to catch up in three big areas:

• Adaptation & Resilience: How do we measure if a community is safer from the next storm?
• The Just Transition: Are we ensuring that the green revolution doesn’t leave the most vulnerable behind?
• Systemic Change: How do we track the way an entire market shifts, rather than just looking at one company at a time?

Hot Tip: Find your own path

A pitfall I see often in IMM (Impact Measurement and Management) is trying to do everything at once. My advice: don’t boil the ocean. The Playbook uses “User Pathways” to help you cut through the noise. Whether you are a fund manager, consultant, measurement specialist, or philanthropic advisor, identify your entry point into the Playbook. It allows searching for resources by stage of the investment cycle, leverage type, sector, and asset class. The Playbook is designed with flexibility so that users can right-size their data collection – if the data isn’t helping you make a better decision, it’s just noise.

Rad Resources:

• The Climate IMM Playbook: This isn’t a static PDF. It’s a clickable guide filled with diligence roadmaps and real-world case studies. 
• The Practitioner’s Resource Table: A cheat sheet of practitioner-recommended tools like the IEA Technology Guide and SDG Impact Standards. You can filter them by your specific investment stage or impact goal.
• Our Community: Climate SMILE is a global group of practitioners from 50+ philanthropies. We work to ensure our collective learning happens as quickly as the climate is changing.

What’s Next?

This Playbook is a living resource, not a final word. I’m already looking toward the next frontiers—like biodiversity and the circular economy. Our community would love to hear how your team is using these tools to drive impact. Let’s keep the conversation going!

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

What does it look like when impact is used in the moment, not just measured after the fact?

At a recent advanced practitioner convening hosted by Impact Frontiers and Global Impact Investing Network at Fondaction in Montreal, that question sat at the center.

For those newer to the space, Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) refers to how impact is measured and actively used to guide decisions, often within investment contexts. For many in AEA, this builds on familiar monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approaches, with a stronger emphasis on decision-making and capital allocation.

A decade ago, normalizing IMM was a collective field-building effort. Karim Harji and I launched the Social Finance TIG within AEA as part of that effort, creating a space for evaluators to engage with and help shape this emerging practice. The goal was to move beyond measurement as an endpoint and toward its use in shaping decisions about capital and impact.

In Montreal, that intent felt realized. Many members of the Social Finance TIG were in the room, working side-by-side as IMM professionals. What once required translation across communities now felt like a shared language and practice, with many others actively engaging.

So what is emerging?

SCALE MATTERS!  Impact investing is now a $1.6 trillion market. Public and private capital are increasingly aligned around impact, and new entrants are coming in with IMM expectations from the start.

IMM is creating value in the moment: IMM processes are being used to shape underwriting, investment theses, risk profiles and portfolio decisions in real time. This is where value is created and where evaluation can later build from.

Ex-ante and ex-post are being connected: There is greater focus on testing assumptions and applying lessons learned, not just reporting outcomes. IMM is becoming iterative, linking prediction, performance, and learning.

Governance is moving to the center: Questions are less about metrics and more about use. Who acts on impact evidence? When is it considered? How are trade-offs navigated?

Technology is accelerating practice: LLMs is expanding what is possible in data use and insight generation, while increasing the need for judgment. However, the field is still grappling with fundamental ethics and governance issues, such as how to ensure privacy and address biases when using LLMs for data analysis.

The scope of IMM is expanding: Systems change, community engagement, and longer-term outcomes are becoming core. These concepts, long familiar to evaluators, are now being integrated into a professional field equipped with its own norms, standards, and scale.

These shifts shape how capital is deployed and how value is defined, which ultimately changes the role of the IMM field beyond “just” measurement.

Tips for evaluators and IMM practitioners:

• Work in the moment. Engage where decisions are being made, not only after.
• Link ex-ante and ex-post. Use evaluation to test and refine assumptions and apply lessons learned.
• Engage governance. Understand who makes decisions and how evidence is used.
• Use LLMs thoughtfully. Enhance insight while maintaining judgment.
• Stay grounded. Community and systems realities remain essential as the field scales.

Rad Resources

• Operating Principles for Impact Management – governance and accountability
• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Karim Harji – systems-level IMM
• Common Approach to Impact Measurement – Standards for flexible, shareable impact measurement.
• We Tested AI Impact Assessments. Here’s What We Learned. – Better Society Capital, SSIR.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

The demand for office hours was evident and rising in 2025. Members in our sector were suddenly hit by job and contract losses; they were justifiably concerned about their ability to find work opportunities, and they were also concerned about professional development. SF TIG leadership conducted a member survey to understand what members wanted from the TIG. One key finding was that our members needed a space where they could not only network with one another but also work through challenging IMM and evaluation problems. We designed a simple format for the office hours: set the topic and invite interested parties to attend. Anyone could present their issues related to the topic or offer solutions to those presenting their challenges. For other office hours, one or two members could informally present a topic and the attendees could ideate and discuss. We hosted our first office hour in May 2025. The results could not have been more surprising and encouraging.

Lessons Learned: Office hours give spaces to build conversation

The office hours quickly gained traction among SF TIG members and prospects.Attendees represented fields of development finance, philanthropy, banking, wealth advisory, academia, and more, joining from around the world from Africa, Europe, and Latin America as well as North America. They were attracted to topics like theories of change in impact investing, how to incorporate systems thinking into Impact Measurement & Management, takeaways from major international impact investing conferences like GIIN and SOCAP, and much more. Some attendees were very new to the concept of impact investing and social finance and simply wanted to hear practitioners exchange in a low-pressure environment. By ensuring that the topics for discussion and problem-solving were real problems that impact investing is trying to solve for now, we drew a larger audience.

This experience illuminated so much. The office hours transformed from being primarily a retention tool to keep current members engaged to a recruitment tool attracting diverse people from all over the world and many industries in an ongoing low-stakes knowledge exchange. The office hours have proven to be warm and welcomin g on-ramp for evaluators and IMM professionals in social finance. The office hours encourage valuable cross-pollination. They also indicate that social finance is as relevant and in-demand as ever. I am happy to be a part of that growth.

 I am excited about what new learning will come from our office hours in 2026. The recent international IMM Convening in Montréal offers more confirmatory evidence that evaluators and IMM specialists are thirsting for opportunities to meet and innovate to advance the field of impact investing. The SF TIG will continue to create these opportunities.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

Over the years, I’ve held onto hope that AEA could become a meaningful home for evaluators working in impact investing. But lately, I’ve been questioning that hope.

I’m more convinced than ever that impact investing represents a critical growth area for our field, especially as traditional funding streams for evaluation shrink, thousands of evaluators are out-of-work, and conference registration numbers drop. Impact investing is not just “another sector”; it’s a rapidly expanding ecosystem where decisions about evidence, impact, and value are being made every day, often without evaluators at the table. And yet, AEA has not embraced this opportunity – even in this moment of reckoning for evaluation.

Lesson Learned: “If we build it, they will come” isn’t enough

Since 2016, the SF TIG has been building spaces within AEA to bridge evaluation and impact investing. Through the TIG, we’ve hosted webinars, written newsletters, created a primer, organized conference sessions and side events, and even developed Summer Institute courses. Past AEA presidents John Gargani and Veronica Olazabal helped elevate impact investing within AEA, framing it as part of the evolving landscape of evaluation as part of their conference themes.

And yet, institutional blockages prevent us from thriving. Social Finance TIG content has been deprioritized at the conference and in AEA’s professional development offerings. Efforts to contribute to broader IMM conversations—like providing feedback on emerging standards (see resources like the Global Impact Investing Network and Impact Management Project)—have faced structural and cultural barriers at AEA. It turns out that building the space is only part of the equation; sustained institutional support and cultural openness matter just as much.

Hot Tip: IMM needs evaluators—whether we show up or not

In the IMM world, many practitioners come from finance, consulting, or business. Some have evaluation training, but many do not. As a result, decisions about what constitutes “good enough” evidence are often made without grounding in mixed methods, culturally responsive approaches, or rigorous evaluation design.

This isn’t a critique—it’s a reality. And it presents an opportunity.

IMM urgently needs stronger alignment with evaluation principles. There’s a real opening for evaluators to help shape practice, inform standards, and advocate for more meaningful and equitable approaches to understanding impact. If we’re not engaged, others will continue defining the field without us.

At the same time, we need to be willing to think differently about what constitutes rigor in the context of an investment versus an established intervention. We should be leading that charge, working to creatively develop new approaches to measurement that adhere to core evaluation principles while meeting investors where they are.

Cool Trick: Bridging requires expanding who’s “in the room”

Impact investing is, by nature, a bridging space. It requires engaging not just evaluators, but investors, fund managers, and entrepreneurs—people who may not identify with our field or its norms.

AEA’s current structure and approach makes this kind of engagement difficult. Add to that a spectrum of reactions within the evaluation community—from curiosity to skepticism to outright resistance and fear—and it becomes even harder to build traction.

But bridging is exactly where innovation happens. If we want to influence IMM, we need to be willing to meet people where they are and expand our definition of who belongs in these conversations.

So here are the questions I’m sitting with:

If AEA isn’t able, or willing, to be a home for this work, where should that home be?

What would it take for evaluators to show up there, together?

And perhaps most importantly: What are we losing by missing the moment?

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

The Social Finance TIG, formerly known as the Social Impact Measurement TIG, is a space for AEA members to share, learn and explore how organizations and initiatives produce, measure and manage social and financial returns.  We have three main goals:

1. To foster connection and knowledge sharing among the evaluation sector and market actors interested in both social and financial return on investment
2. Develop and/or adapt evaluation tools and approaches for innovative finance and market-based models
3. Strengthen the ability of individuals and organizations to assess and evaluate social impact in this rapidly emerging area.

We see ourselves as bridge-builders, connecting the evaluation community with the corporate philanthropy, impact investing and social entrepreneurship sectors.

In this year’s AEA365 week, we showcase real life examples of how we are doing just that – bridging industries, building communities and shaping emerging practices. 

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming this week

• Courtney Bolinson articulates why Impact Measurement & Management (IMM) urgently needs stronger alignment with evaluation principles, and that Evaluators have a responsibility to make that happen…if we choose to show up. 
• Vivian Agbegha shows how the Social Finance TIG’s office hours provides a needed space for Evaluation and IMM practitioners to come together in low-stakes knowledge exchange. 
• Veronica Olazabal provides a report-back and insights from the the recent IMM practitioner convening hosted by Impact Frontiers and the Global Impact Investing Network
• Marta Arranz shares about the Climate Impact Investing IMM Playbook created by Climate SMILE, which tackles important topics of Adaptation & Resilience, the Just Transition, Systemic Change in climate investing.
• Emery and Taylor share their approach to evaluating the effectiveness of Entrepreneur Support Organizations to offer a more complete picture of impact that honors both individual progress and collective resilience
• Nina Sabarre, Kathleen Doll and Courtney Bolinson, close out the week by sharing how to adapt the tools of Learning & Evaluation to support Impact Investing

We hope you stay tuned and learn more about the exciting world of Social Finance!

• Social Finance TIG Webinars

• Read more about (and JOIN!) the Social Finance TIG here

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Finance TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Finance Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Social Finance TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

The work I’ll share in this post brings together two of my favorite things – grants and capacity development! Specifically, our framework focuses on university STEM faculty; but you can consider adapting it with anyone pursuing external funding for their work.

Lesson Learned: Funding Matters

This lesson is useful in framing our work as evaluators in the world around us. We have all experienced the impact funding can have in our ability to keep doing great work, both in programs and in their evaluation. In universities without large, supportive research infrastructure, STEM faculty can face barriers in pursuing funding. And that affects not only their own ability to sustain meaningful work, but also their evaluation budgets to measure the meaningful work.

In 2024, I worked with an interdisciplinary group to reach out to STEM faculty in non-R1 universities. We wanted to understand a) faculty’s most common barriers to pursuing external funding, b) processes that have built their capacity to pursue funding, and c) small outcomes that have led to their success with external funding. We presented our pilot study findings in an ASEE paper entitled Unveiling the mystery: A capacity development framework for early-career STEM educators pursuing external funding.

Rad Resource: The Collabo-Gleaning Framework

Created from our brilliant faculty participants’ lived experiences, this resource is useful to guide other faculty in universities with limited support for pursuing external funding. This may be particularly useful for evaluators who partner with STEM education researchers early in the proposal development process and who are involved in identifying sources of external funding. 

Collabo-gleaning relationships are those in which an individual STEM faculty/researcher intentionally collaborates with a more experienced researcher in order to build their own capacity for pursuing external funding.

We love this strategy because it focuses not on improvements for university research offices, but rather on what the individual faculty has the power to do in building their own capacity. Collabo-gleaning also defines success as capacity built, not just grants won. It counts the wins faculty can control: building relationships, sharpening skills, and taking deliberate steps toward funding with each submission.

Here is the full Collabo-Gleaning Framework, with both process-related and outcome-related dimensions:

Hot Tip: Encourage STEM faculty colleagues to consider collabo-gleaning relationships to help them pursue funding.

Faculty can use our team’s self-assessment to uncover their individualized needs, potential collabo-gleaning relationships, and next steps in building their capacity.

Finally, I want to shout out to my collaborators in this work, Dr. Allie DeLeo-Allen, Dr. Katie Evans, Dr. Anne Case Hanks, Dr. Krystal Corbett Cruse, and Dr. Kacie Mennie.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting STEM Education and Training TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education and Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our STEM Education and Training TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.