Evaluating programs is crucial for sport organizations. For example, evaluation can be used to demonstrate the impact of programs to funding agencies (like Sport Canada) or inform changes in programming to better serve sport participants. However, many sport organizations lack the time, money, or knowledge and experience to effectively undertaken evaluation work (Mitchell & Berlan, 2016; Lovell et al., 2016).
With the aim of filling a sector-wide gap in evaluation capacity and improving our internal evaluation practices, the Sport Information Resource Centre (SIRC) partnered with Corliss Bean, PhD, CE, a researcher and evaluation expert from Brock University. Together, we formed a research partnership focused on delivering a knowledge translation intiative intended to increase evaluation knowledge and capacity among non-profit sport organizations in Canada.
In this SIRCuit article, we’ll describe our partnership and our process for planning, delivering and evaluating our knowledge translation initiative. We’ll also provide tips and learnings for organizations looking to engage in research partnerships.
This SIRCuit article is based on an academic articleOpens in a new window coauthored by SIRC and Corliss Bean. Download the article here.
Developing the partnership
In 2020, SIRC engaged Corliss Bean, PhD, CE, to facilitate a 2-part evaluation workshop for SIRC staff members. The workshop allowed us to reflect on our evaluation practices and identify ways in which they could be improved. Through this workshop and discussions with other sport organizations, we realized that there was a need for more evaluation education in the sport sector, as many organizations did not have the knowledge or capacity to perform meaningful evaluations of their initiatives.
To address this need, we formed a research partnership. Research partnerships are when researchers and community stakeholders or organizations come together to work towards a common goal that will benefit research and practice (Holt et al., 2018; Kendellen et al., 2017). The goals of our partnership were to:
- Co-host a webinar series focused on teaching evaluation skills that would fill key knowledge gaps and improve evaluation capacity in the sport sector.
- Co-create resources (for example, worksheets and videos) that would complement the webinar series to facilitate knowledge uptake and enhance the reach of the initiative.
- Co-evaluate the webinar series and resources so that we could learn about what worked well and what could be improved.
- Build SIRC’s evaluation capacity so that we can increase our knowledge, improve our programs and better serve Canada’s sport sector.
Partnership principles
To maintain a positive relationship and engage meaningfully with one another, we developed a set of principles to guide our research partnership. These principles were drawn from a list generated based on a synthesis of the partnership literature (Hoekstra et al., 2020). Together with our research partner, Corliss Bean, we identified and agreed upon the principles that both partners felt would contribute to a successful partnership. A list of these principles and examples of the strategies we used to uphold each principle is below.
Guiding the process
For initiatives to have an impact, they must be thoughtfully designed with the needs of the knowledge users (in our case, sport administrators) in mind. To ensure that our initiative would have an impact, we guided its planning, delivery and evaluation using the Knowledge to Action Framework (KTA; Graham et al., 2006).
The KTA framework is comprised of 2 processes. The first process is the Knowledge Creation Funnel, which you can see in the centre of Figure 1. The knowledge creation funnel describes the process of creating new knowledge and synthesizing it into key messages that can be shared in the form of tools and products. The second process is the Action Cycle, which you can see on the outer ring of Figure 1. The Action Cycle describes the process of designing implementing, and evaluating evidence-informed resources, programs or initiatives to sustain knowledge use in practice.
Our initiative was guided primarily by the Action Cycle. Below, we describe how we used the stages of the Action Cycle to inform the planning, delivery and evaluation of our initiative. These steps may serve as a useful blueprint for guiding your next knowledge translation project.
Step 1: Identify the problem and determine the knowledge-to-action gap
We identified a need to improve our internal evaluation capacity and engaged a researcher with relevant expertise to help us. Recognizing a broader sector-wide gap in evaluation knowledge and capacity, we formed a research partnership to help close this gap.
Step 2: Select knowledge and adapt it to the local context
As a partnership, we reviewed the evaluation literature in the non-profit and sport contexts to see what had previously been done. We considered our own experiences with evaluation and reached out to other organizations to learn about their needs. Together we identified 3 priority topics reflecting key gaps in non-profit and sport sector evaluation knowledge.
Step 3: Assess barriers and facilitators to knowledge use
We used the findings of our literature review and our first-hand experiences to identify some of the key reasons why organizations were not performing evaluation. Common barriers to evaluation practice in non-profit sport organizations included:
- A lack of staff experience or training
- A lack of operationalized resources
- Limited financial resources
By understanding what was stopping organizations from performing evaluation, we could better design resources to help them overcome these barriers.
Step 4: Select, tailor and implement interventions
We planned to deliver webinars as the main component of our initiative because of the success of SIRC’s Experts in the HouseOpens in a new window webinar series. Webinars are geographically and financially accessible to a wide range of people, can host many participants at once, and can be recorded and shared at a later date. To complement the webinars, we developed and shared blog posts, videos, and templates. These resources repackaged the knowledge shared through the webinar series in diverse formats to support learning and future application of knowledge. We hosted these resources in a free, easily accessible online toolkit on SIRC’s webpageOpens in a new window. The webinar series and complementary resources helped to overcome barriers including limited financial resources and evaluation resources, and provided an opportunity for participants to enhance their evaluation knowledge in our 3 priority areas.