As governments increase focus on outcomes, evidence and accountability, community service organisations are under growing pressure to strengthen data collection, outcomes measurement and evaluation practice. Yet these environments, shaped by complex funding models, reporting requirements and workforce pressures, are rarely designed with evaluation in mind. This presentation draws on the experience of the Outcomes Practice and Evidence Network within Victoria’s Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare over the past eight years, working across Victoria’s child and family services sector. Positioned between government, service organisations and evaluators, OPEN offers a rare cross-system perspective on how evaluation is experienced in practice. We will share practical insights, building a grounded understanding of how service settings experience evaluation and how approaches can be adapted to better support learning, improvement and outcomes. Despite established literature on building organisational evaluative culture, there’s been limited focus on how to achieve this across a whole service system. This presentation reflects on that gap, exploring what it means to support evaluation capability across a sector shaped by cross-system relationships. The session shares a learning journey rather than fixed model - what has worked, what has not, and what questions this raises. Three key insights will be explored: 1. Understanding context is foundational – challenges are often structural and relational, not technical. 2. Evaluation support requires adaptation – commonly used approaches may not work as expected in complex service environments; trust, shared language and sustained engagement are critical. 3. This is a system question – strengthening evaluation requires attention to capability and how government expectations, commissioning and evaluation practice interact. The session, aligning with Boundaries and Bridges and Roots and Routes, combines reflections from OPEN with a community sector partner, alongside interactive discussions exploring grounding evaluation in service contexts while strengthening connections across the evaluation ecosystem.
