Whai it the Critical Friend evaluatiojn method, and why more NGOs, INGOs and partnership projects should use it
When organisations want to learn from their work, not just evaluate a project, that’s when the Critical Friend method is useful. Here’s how.
In a Critical friend evaluation, the evaluator sits alongside an organisation throughout a programme, rather than arriving at the end to render a verdict. You share observations in real time, ask challenging questions early enough that they can still be acted on, and build enough trust to have honest conversations.
We’ve used this approach for several years, with 10 European NGO platforms, including multi-year evaluations of the Trio EU Presidency projects.
In this brief, we will share a bit of theory about the methodology, some practical implications that we’ve learned by doing, and some feedback from the organisations about how this approach helped them.
What is the Critical Friend methodology?
It is essentially a learning methodology, initially designed and used in educational processes as a peer learning tool meant to improve learning outcomes for students.
The method can easily be transferred to projects in the civic, social and humanitarian fields, because it essentially means that external actors acting as facilitators or evaluators – the Critical Friends – listen and ask insightful questions that encourage organisations to define and articulate the rationale and intended outcomes of their work.
It is especially well suited to programs that involve multiple organisations working together to deliver complex interventions.
A critical friend is “a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend … takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward [and who] is an advocate for the success of that work”. [1]
The main mechanism is working groups, convened and moderated by the Critical Friend, in which the members of a team:
- Explain their work and challenges
- Receive questions and feedback from their peers
- Reflect collectively on the feedback they have received
How we’ve used it in practice as an evaluation method
The key to using the Critical Friend method in evaluation is to adapt it to every project. While the process looked different for each project, these four steps were common:
- A workshop with the project partners, early in the project’s lifecycle – but not too early, they should have had a few months to get to work together – to understand their main challenges and needs. For instance, they might want to learn how to improve collaboration within a consortium, how to better define common advocacy goals, and how to integrate different interventions for more impact. These expressed needs then become the main topic of the critical friend workshops. This initial meeting is also a good time to collect people’s expectations from the Critical Friend process.
- A series of learning workshops, at critical junctures in the project, each designed to reflect on the key challenges defined above. The Critical Friends design the questions and facilitate the conversation, and the participants present their challenges and reflect on them in small groups.
- Critical Friends observe ongoing project activities and meetings to understand how the activities and collaboration play out in real time.
- Regular Critical Friend reports that summarise the learnings from the previous steps, as well as pending questions, unresolved challenges, and recommendations about how to address them.
In practice, this was a process that lasted for around 1.5 years, and included at least three reflection workshops and three Critical Friend reports, in addition to multiple points of observation of activities and meetings.
Feedback from participants. Was the Critical Friend process useful, and how?
The use of the Critical Friend methodology proved to be very useful in creating the space to discuss all the dilemmas the partners had at the beginning of the project. Having external facilitators to bring the partners to set a common horizon, and also direct attention to the specific challenges that can be adjusted throughout the implementation, helped the partners set a course. Among the different activities under the CF umbrella, the highest-rated were the inception report and the first meeting of the trio and their critical friends, which shows the added value of the CF methodology: the relevant insights are found at a time when challenges can be addressed and strengths capitalised on.
What participants said:
The most helpful aspects from the CF process:
“It enhanced and structured collaboration between very different partners with regard to reaching common goals and building capacities in implementing the project.”
“The process brought the partners more together. It provided more opportunities to discuss strategies. The project started to feel more like a common project rather than three separate projects that are brought under one project. ”
“Insights through exchange with CF enabled us to adapt instantly.”
“The process helped us to see the bigger picture and what we have achieved beyond the activities.”
[1] Costa, Arthur & Kallick, Bena. (1993). Through the Lens of a Critical Friend. Educational Leadership. 51. Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234658747_Through_the_Lens_of_a_Critical_Friend