Revisiting Oh for the Love of Sticky Notes! The Changing Role of Evaluators Who Work with Foundations

To celebrate CEI's 15th anniversary, we're spending 2024 reflecting on 15 of our most favorite pieces.

What it is

CEI’s founder Julia Coffman wrote Oh for the Love of Sticky Notes! in 2016 about the evolution of what the philanthropic sector requires of learning and evaluation practitioners and how and why those expectations have evolved over the last four decades.

Evaluators are now expected to have multiple skills and play varied roles, which include being applied social science researchers, theorists, strategists, strategic communicators, systems thinkers, facilitators, coaches, and trainers. This requires the constant development and refining of new skills to support learning for individuals, groups, and organizations.

What it's a favorite

The article blends history and humor and draws on Julia’s own experiences, personality, and preferences as a long-time evaluator in philanthropy. As a classic introvert and INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (which we have realized since the article was published is a fairly common profile among evaluators), Julia reflects on her own challenges engaging on the more extroverted sides of the role, such as facilitating learning exercises (which is why the article’s title gives a tongue in cheek nod to the essential tool of all facilitation—sticky notes).

What we would change

The piece does not attend to our roles as learning and evaluation practitioners in advancing racial equity. In recent years, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative has helped to make the critical importance of this role more visible in philanthropy and has given us clear principles and guidelines to follow through the Equitable Evaluation Framework (TM). While being a racial equity advocate should be called out as a distinct role, at the same time, we see this role as necessarily integrated with all others. It should, for example, affect how we conduct research and the questions we ask, guide what we explore in theory, and shape how and with whom we communicate and facilitate.

A version of this article is included in Michael Quinn Patton’s 2017 book, Facilitating Evaluation [Sage Publications].