Authors: Nicholas Hill Place Australia, Eve Millar, Place Australia The use of place-based initiatives (PBIs) to address complex and entrenched disadvantage is expanding across Australia. These initiatives typically go beyond the delivery of single programs and involve cross-sector partnerships that place communities at the centre of efforts to address local problems. While a growing number of initiatives are demonstrating impact, the diversity of approaches, frameworks, and indicators used contributes to a fragmented evidence base. Inconsistencies in how impact is conceptualised and reported limit opportunities for shared learning and present a barrier to the growth and sustainability of the place-based ecosystem.
PLACE Australia is working collaboratively with stakeholders across the ecosystem—including government, philanthropy, not-for-profits, and community organisations—to develop a shared impact framework with a set of flexible indicators that more consistently demonstrate the impact of PBIs, support ongoing learning, and strengthen the sector. As the framework moves from development to implementation, a number of practical challenges arise. These include how shared indicators can be applied flexibly across diverse initiatives, how to balance consistency with local adaptation, how frameworks can support learning rather than compliance, and how Indigenous knowledge and community voice can be embedded in practice.
This roundtable brings together evaluators and practitioners to explore these challenges and identify practical pathways for implementation. Through facilitated discussion, participants will share their practice insights on implementation opportunities, risk and design considerations. The discussion will inform the next phase of testing and implementation of the shared impact framework.
Participants will be invited to reflect on the following questions:
1.How can shared indicators be consistently applied across diverse place-based initiatives while remaining meaningful to local contexts?
2.How can shared impact approaches support learning and improvement without becoming compliance-driven reporting requirements?
3.What risks and opportunities should be considered when implementing shared impact approaches across the place-based ecosystem?
4.What is needed to support the implementation and uptake of the shared impact framework across the sector?
Author: Maedeh Aboutalebi, Good Sheppard Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand is piloting an innovative ecological family and domestic violence (FDV) emergency accommodation model at Bridget House, offering safe, culturally responsive, short-term housing for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women and children. The service replaces motel accommodation and integrates a wrap-around service hub providing therapeutic, educational, legal, and wellbeing supports, delivered on-site and via outreach. The design was informed by women with lived experience of FDV to ensure culturally safe, child-friendly, and practical spaces.
Using a developmental evaluation approach, staff reflections and interviews captured real-time insights during implementation. Seven reflective journaling sessions between July and November 2025 were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, identifying seven key themes: client journey, service model principles, wrap-around support, client outcomes, service realities, program adaptation, and recommendations. Findings illustrate how predictable routines, cultural awareness, communal support, and integrated services fostered safety, empowerment, and early positive outcomes for mothers and children.
This presentation will share practical wisdom for implementing trauma-informed, client-centred, and culturally responsive FDV emergency accommodation, highlighting lessons for real-time adaptation, program sustainability, and the development of feasible alternatives to motel-based housing for CALD families.
Author: Annabel Prescott (Traction for Young People), Samantha Garbutt (Traction for Young People) Youth program evaluation faces a critical ethical question: Who is evaluation data for?
Drawing on Feedback Informed Treatment principles and youth empowerment frameworks, this presentation argues that when young people engage with their own data to understand and celebrate their growth, evaluation becomes a tool for agency rather than extraction.
Using TRACTION, a Queensland youth mentoring organisation, as a case study, we examine how internationally validated screening tools serve young people first and organisational learning second. Young people complete visual assessments at program entry, engage with their progress through facilitated conversations during the program, and review before-and-after results at completion. They keep their own copies and use their data in conversations with family, teachers, and others. This process makes visible the work young people have done, enabling them to name and claim their own progress.
The presentation explores three critical tensions:
1. How do we design evaluation that acknowledges young people as active participants in their own change process, not passive subjects of measurement? 2. What shifts when we position self-awareness and celebration as primary evaluation outcomes, with strategic metrics as secondary? 3. How do we ensure data collection practices honour young people's agency rather than extracting information purely for organisational purposes?
We present real examples of facilitated data conversations, visual assessment tools, and moments when young people recognise their own growth through evidence. When evaluation is grounded in participant empowerment, where people understand, acknowledge, and celebrate their own growth, it creates a foundation for ethical strategic data use.
This approach transfers to evaluation with any structurally marginalised population: First Nations communities, people experiencing disadvantage, or those marginalised by traditional service systems. Attendees will leave with critical questions for examining whether their own evaluation practices serve participant agency or organisational needs first
Author: Liesl Harrold, Australian Taxation Office Problematisation is a deliberate process of dismantling a problem to understand the different ways of thinking that lead to the classification of phenomena as a problem. It goes beyond the construction of problem statements to focus on the effort required to understand historical and theoretical assumptions underpinning its framing. Problematisation is a way to test assumptions, generate new ideas, and make new connections to theoretical understandings. In evaluation, it has the potential to provide rigour to practices associated with judging through structuring evaluative thinking.
Using a skill building format, this paper will help participants understand the role of problems in evaluation. The format will follow an explain-model-apply in a group teaching format including practical application of selected trans-disciplinary theories and approaches. It will include a brief overview of:
•Problem logics and how they can be constructed •Problem representation and the genealogy of problems •Key theories that can support evaluators to think differently e.g. social identity and psychological safety theoretical frameworks.
Problematisation provides a systematic approach that offers evaluators support to think differently, rather than using existing knowledge to validate existing thoughts. Evaluators’ worldviews and skills influence their competence which may manifest in generalisations of the problem.
Problem-solving is a role in evaluation, as it supports the purpose of interventions in directing social change. They are primarily considered in the needs analysis phase of an evaluation to anchor program logics. However, this foundation has implications for intervention design, defining outcomes and establishing criteria of merit. Monitoring frameworks, particularly when using sentinel indicators, are also influenced by problem framing and assumptions. Indigenous and transformative approaches, where the rectification of historical power imbalances is essential, would find this particularly relevant. Problematisation can prepare participants for truth-telling, a step in reconciling intergenerational trauma and stopping systemic violence (Payne & Norman, 2025).
Assistant Director, Small Business Evaluation Hub, Australian Taxation Office
Liesl works in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), helping business areas deliver quality evaluations and to build their evaluation culture, capacity and practice. With over 25 years of evaluation experience, Liesl has also worked for Queensland Treasury and Trade where she assisted... Read More →
Friday September 18, 2026 11:30am - 12:30pm ACST Rooms 3+4Stokes Hill Rd, Darwin City NT, Australia
Authors: Su-Ann Drew, Grosvenor, Jo van Twest Farmer, Rooftop Social, Eleanor Williams, ACE, Emma Williams, Martina Donkers Ethical pressures arise due to a range of conflicting incentives that for those who commission and deliver evaluations. Evaluators may try to maintain methodological rigour while meeting tight timeframes or limited budgets. Commissioners may need defensible evidence while navigating organisational expectations, political sensitivities or shifting priorities. These pressures are real and often lead to ethical tensions for all involved, without an agreed or shared language for discussion. This session creates space for attendees to discuss challenges openly, safely and constructively, helps participants recognise and make sense of pressures shaping commissioning decisions, and builds participants’ confidence in responding in ways that support both quality and working relationships.
Building on previous AES presentations on 'everyday ethics', we give participants tools to apply in real-world commissioning contexts by introducing a simple organising framework, the Evaluation Pressure System, which helps participants identify the mix of pressures influencing a situation and why tensions arise. The framework is a guide to support reflection and conversation rather than a technical model.
Using the framework, we will explore fictional but realistic scenarios that illustrate common pressure points in commissioning and evaluation delivery. Participants will be invited, through anonymous polling, to indicate the extent to which each scenario reflects situations they have encountered. Through in-room conversations, attendees will use the framework to examine what helps maintain integrity and constructive working relationships when pressures collide. The intention is not to analyse cases in depth, but to build a clearer shared understanding of tensions that arise and how they can be handled well.
To support ongoing application, attendees will receive a Trade‑off Log to clarify constraints and integrity risks, and practical communication strategies for raising concerns early and negotiating expectations. These will help participants recognise tensions earlier, discuss them more openly and navigate them in ways that support quality and collaboration.
Su-Ann is a Manager specialising in program evaluation within Grosvenor’s public sector advisory practice. Su-Ann has more than a decade of rich and diverse professional experience, which enables her to offer a unique perspective and critical lens to solving complex problems for... Read More →
Authors: Eleanor Williams, ACE, Jade Maloney, ARTD, Jess Buchwald Did you grow up wanting to be an evaluator? For most of us the answer is no, and there is value in the way we have all fallen into evaluation profession from diverse backgrounds.
But what does this mean for our career pathways and the way others think of evaluation and evaluators? What does it mean for evaluation as a profession?
As the leading voice for evaluation in Australian, the Australian Evaluation Society has long considered options for and pathways to professionalisation that strengthen our roots as a society, and develop the routes to a future in which evaluation profession is increasingly recognised and valued.
The 2024-2028 AES Strategic Plan firmly put considering pathways to professionalisation back on the agenda. A working group has since been exploring options for professionalisation, drawing on learnings from the review undertaking by Peersman and Rogers in 2017, consistent with the AES values, and informed by the experiences of other evaluation associations and other professionalisation associations in Australia. Now it’s time to seek your views because professionalisation is for you, the Australian evaluation community.
Harnessing the success of the fishbowl approach to exploring quality evaluation that makes a difference at the 2025 conference, we are inviting everyone to jump in and share their thoughts about the value professionalisation would provide, and the risks to be managed to ensure the pathway are accessible, inclusive and respectful of diverse ways of knowing. The working group understands there are diverse views on professionalisation and invites these to be surfaced in this conversation.
The session will be facilitated by professionalisation working group co-chairs Eleanor Williams, Jade Maloney and Jess Buchwald with opportunities to contribute live or through written formats. The working group will use what you share in shaping the route forward.
And yes, there will again be chocolate fish rewards for contributors.
Just think: What would it look like if the next generation could grow up wanting to be an evaluator? What if when you became an evaluator you could see a clear pathway forward?
I work with government agencies, not-for-profits and citizens to co-design, refine, communicate and evaluate social policies, regulatory systems and programs. I am passionate about ensuring citizens have a voice in shaping the policies that affect their lives, translating research... Read More →
Eleanor Williams is the Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Evaluation and established the Australian Public Sector Evaluation Network in 2019. She is a former AES Board member and chairs the OECD's Public Policy Evaluation Experts group.
Eleanor is currently undertaking PhD research on evidence use in fast-paced policy contexts with supervisors at the University of Queensland and University College London and has a particular interest in rapid evaluation methods... Read More →
Friday September 18, 2026 11:30am - 12:30pm ACST Hall 2
Authors: Bethany Hanson, Tafe NSW, Emily Gates, Boston University, Martina Donkers Strap in for a provocative, contentious, and fun session. We’re putting a spin on the classic debate where two teams will go head-to-head to argue the topic: “Evaluation’s pluralism strengthens its external influence.”
On the affirmative side, a spirited case for why pluralism is evaluation’s superpower. Surely leaning into our intersections with disciplines like policy, research and economics expands our reach, relevance, and impact. Embracing pluralism helps evaluators speak multiple “languages,” build trust with diverse stakeholders, and positions evaluation as a boundary‑spanning connector capable of influencing decisions in complex systems. Think: more collaboration, more innovation, and more doors opening because evaluators can flex and adapt.
The negative team will challenge! Doesn’t boundless pluralism stretch evaluation too far, making our unique identity fuzzy and our professional standards harder to uphold? Aren’t we risking dilution of expertise and inconsistencies in practice? Won’t trying to be “everything to everyone” only confuse commissioners and undermine the credibility we’ve spent decades building? Without firmer boundaries, evaluation risks becoming a methodological buffet with no clear value proposition at all.
And then there’s you- our third speaker. A debate without rebuttal is like an evaluation report without findings—unthinkable! So, you’ll choose a side and with a team of fellow audience-members and debaters, craft a knockout final argument for our third speakers.
Will it be chaotic? Quite possibly. Could things get messy? Almost definitely. Will you have FOMO if you miss it? Without a doubt.
Featuring thought leaders Amy Gullickson, Martina Donkers, Matt Healey, George Argyrous, Kate McKegg and AES Fellow, Rick Cummings, this session promises to be the highlight of the conference. Who will be victorious? Let the 2026 (Mostly-Serious) Crowd-Sourced Debate begin!
Kate has specialist skills in supporting evaluative thinking and practice in complex settings where people are innovating to create systems change. She has been applying these skills for over 25 years in government, non-government, philanthropic and community contexts, including many... Read More →
Principal Consultant | Co-Founder, First Person Consulting
I'm Matt, Co-Founder of First Person Consulting. I work at the intersection of systems thinking, evaluation and design — helping people make sense of messy, complex problems with a healthy dose of humour and humility. I also co-host the It Depends Podcast, where the honest answer... Read More →
Rick Cummings is an Emeritus Professor in Public Policy at Murdoch University. He has 40 years of experience conducting evaluation studies in education, training, health, and crime prevention primarily for the state and commonwealth government agencies and the World Bank. He currently... Read More →
Emily Gates is a tenured associate professor at Boston College whose research explores how evaluation can support meaningful, values-driven change in complex systems. Her work bridges theory and practice, spanning more than 30 publications and two coauthored books: Evaluative Inquiry... Read More →
Author: Annabel Prescott, Traction For Young People Youth program evaluation faces a critical ethical question: Who is evaluation data for?
Drawing on Feedback Informed Treatment principles and youth empowerment frameworks, this presentation argues that when young people engage with their own data to understand and celebrate their growth, evaluation becomes a tool for agency rather than extraction.
Using TRACTION, a Queensland youth mentoring organisation, as a case study, we examine how internationally validated screening tools serve young people first and organisational learning second. Young people complete visual assessments at program entry, engage with their progress through facilitated conversations during the program, and review before-and-after results at completion. They keep their own copies and use their data in conversations with family, teachers, and others. This process makes visible the work young people have done, enabling them to name and claim their own progress.
The presentation explores three critical tensions:
1. How do we design evaluation that acknowledges young people as active participants in their own change process, not passive subjects of measurement? 2. What shifts when we position self-awareness and celebration as primary evaluation outcomes, with strategic metrics as secondary? 3. How do we ensure data collection practices honour young people's agency rather than extracting information purely for organisational purposes?
We present real examples of facilitated data conversations, visual assessment tools, and moments when young people recognise their own growth through evidence. When evaluation is grounded in participant empowerment, where people understand, acknowledge, and celebrate their own growth, it creates a foundation for ethical strategic data use.
This approach transfers to evaluation with any structurally marginalised population: First Nations communities, people experiencing disadvantage, or those marginalised by traditional service systems. Attendees will leave with critical questions for examining whether their own evaluation practices serve participant agency or organisational needs first.
Author: Themis Antony, Beyond Blue This session will provide an overview of a practical approach utilised by Beyond Blue to develop an engaging, streamlined and systematic approach to capturing evaluation-ready outcomes data.
Objective and key messages: The objective of the session is to share how traditional and adapted approaches were used to develop a core outcomes dataset that heavily engaged staff in the process, while factoring in the inherent challenges of defining, collecting and using outcomes data within the multi-faceted operating environment in which Beyond Blue works.
The key element of the approach was its deliberate focus on making space for, and meaningfully engaging, staff across the organisation to shape the outcomes development process. Rather than being imposed, the approach was co-developed with staff and embedded in day-to-day practice. This resulted in a network of interrelated program logic models that are owned by individual program areas. The data generated through this approach is also owned by program areas and used to inform evaluations and is actively owned by staff at all levels. Insights are shared widely, including with community members, government and corporate funders, donors and sector colleagues, supporting transparency, accountability and collective learning.
The session will include a practical demonstration of the logic models in action, showing how they are used to guide decision making, monitor progress and support evaluation.
Overall, the session aims to share a practical approach to outcomes measurement, provide an example of how to bridge the evaluation gap for staff who may be less familiar with data collection, and demonstrate how strong evaluation and research integrity can be maintained while building organisational evaluation capacity.
Interactivity: Time will be set aside for interactive discussion and debate, enabling participants to reflect on how similar approaches could be adapted to their own organisational contexts and how the approach could be enhanced.
