How to ‘Get Through’

Abstract

A challenge for all formative evaluators is how to communicate advice and ‘get through’ to the evaluand in order to bring about improvements. This case study of an evaluation of a Norwegian business development program analyses three different attempts at intervention by evaluators. Based on this, the article identifies four critical challenges in formative evaluation. First, stakeholders must clearly express their expectations when hiring evaluators. Second, the evaluator and the evaluand must represent different perspectives, thus together creating diversity as a basis for innovation. Third, diversity provides a challenge in terms of communication, and creates a need for a good form of communication. Fourth, we found that the best form of communication was to construct the arguments for change in terms of the functionality (does it work?) of the program. We called this functional argumentation, as opposed to normative argumentation.