How evaluations are commissioned affects a wide range of people involved with both the activity being evaluated and the process of the evaluation. The funder has a lot at stake to ascertain the benefit of the activity[1] and the cost of the evaluation. So too, do other parties and participants who value the activity and/or contribute their time, knowledge and experience to the evaluation.
This is the first of three blogs emerging from a workshop about commissioning organised by the AES Fellows at the 2025 AES conference. It complements other recent presentations about alternatives to traditional methods of procurement of evaluations.
[1] The generic term 'activity' is used to incorporate: program, service, strategy, event, facility, system
