At Conectas, impact evaluation has always been an important institutional priority. We have come to understand evaluation not so much as a results assessment, but instead, like Emma Naughton and Kevin Kelpin have noted, as a process that contributes to improve our institutional learning. This approach to evaluation also allows us to discover impacts that we might not have expected. If organizations use evaluation only to assess the level of the desired result(s), and not to learn more about the intervention overall, they might miss many other changes that have occurred.
Our approach and process allows us to evaluate not only our own operations, but also how the context might be changing, evolving and affecting our plans. Despite the many complexities, it is essential to understand if and how change is happening—including unanticipated change—and how constituencies and organizations may have contributed to this change.
Only by understanding if advocacy strategies have been effective and why (or why not), can we understand whether it would make sense to replicate it. Last year, for the first time, Conectas and partner organizations from the Criminal Justice Network launched a large media campaign against the practice of invasive strip-searches for family members who visit their relatives in prison. The impact of the campaign was two-fold: in the state of Sao Paulo, where the campaign was launched, a law was passed to ban the practice, which in and of itself was a great victory. In addition, while not endorsing “human rights” directly, a new audience started to empathize with the situation of these women—grandmothers, mothers or daughters—who have to go through these humiliating treatments in order to visit their relatives in prison. By appealing to people’s understanding of the barbaric situation that prisoners’ relatives have to go through, as opposed to prisoners themselves, the campaign gathered unprecedented support. This impact was unexpected, and learning to identify it has helped us think about other human rights campaigns that could rally an even larger audience to our causes.
