Monitoring and evaluation

What Works Global Summit 2016

By 21/09/2016

Research to Action covered the What Works Global Summit 2016, which ran Monday 26th to Wednesday 28th September in various locations across London. The summit, organised by 3ie, the Campbell Collaboration, Sense about Science and the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation at Queens University Belfast, convened policy makers, programme managers and a number of different research projects to discuss how to really put evidence to work and ensure that it is at the heart of development policy and practice.

The summit had seven key themes, of which three areas of best practice will be of particular interest to development researchers and communications professionals:

  • “Promoting policy uptake of research findings: What can and should researchers and intermediary organizations do to promote uptake of research in policy and practice communities?  What are the best approaches to stakeholder and media engagement?  How can evidence-based guidelines be developed?
  • Knowledge translation: What are effective approaches of knowledge translation to promote use of evidence? How should tools such as evidence portals, policy briefs, evidence and gap maps be used? Who is the target audience for different evidence products?
  • Measuring policy impact: How do we measure the impact of research and advocacy? How should organizations measure their impact?”

Research to Action tweeted the summit, collecting the many conversations in a  #wwgs2016 countdown Storify.  The full programme of panels and free evening lectures can be found on the WWGS2016 website.

If you were unable to attend the event there are a number of ways for you to catch up. Research to Action live tweeted from various 3ie panels on the Research to Action’s Twitter account using the hashtag #wwgs2016, and posted pictures from the summit to Research to Action’s Instagram account. The Campbell Collaboration curated a number of Twitter lists of sponsors and speakers and Research to Action created a larger list of everyone involved in the #wwgs2016 conversation that you can subscribe to and follow.

If you are interested in sharing your perspective, project experiences or top tips about ‘What Works’ for communicating development research then you can find out how to contribute to Research to Action by writing a blog or suggesting a resource.