As the advocacy efforts of human rights organizations have become more complex and arguably more sophisticated, important technical issues have arisen concerning the evaluation of those interventions. In fact, the particular requirements of evaluating advocacy campaigns have contributed to a wave of innovation in the field. A diverse menu of methodological options is now at the disposal of even small to medium-sized human rights organizations.
This innovation has been productive but has tended to focus the evaluation discussion, even within the human rights sector, on a series of technical and operational issues. The choice among evaluation approaches is not, however, a purely technical issue.
How an organization does its work must be taken into account in the design of assessment approaches. Organizations develop remarkably resilient cultural patterns, or patterns of social interaction in the work process. For example, since the work is never really done, in some organizations social pressure develops for staff to work very long hours at a frenetic pace. In others, it might be an organizational norm to carefully document all aspects of work undertaken, even if it means that other work is not completed. Evaluation methods that conflict with those patterns—no matter how technically appropriate—fail to yield the desired results. How an organization does its work must be taken into account in the design of assessment approaches, the choice of external evaluators and the way in which any exercise is implemented.
