Step 5. Reporting Results

Highlights

In Step 5, it’s time to focus on what came out of the exchange—what worked and led to learning and inspiration, what did not work and why. You will share the story of your journey, prepare participants to share their stories, and think about next steps to maintain the momentum for change.
 

In Step 5 you will:

 

In many ways your knowledge exchange journey is almost complete.

  • By anchoring the exchange you set the context and identified the players.
  • Your stakeholders defined their intermediate outcomes and established indicators for determining whether they successfully achieved them.
  • Together, you and the knowledge exchange participants designed the knowledge
    exchange journey to achieve the intermediate outcomes.
  • Lastly, you used knowledge exchange instruments and activities to help participants gain experiences they needed to tackle the institutional challenges to reaching their development goal.

In Step 5, it’s time to focus on what came out of the exchange—what worked and led to learning and inspiration, what did not work and why. You will share the story of your journey, prepare participants to share their stories, and think about next steps to maintain the momentum for change.

Remember that this knowledge exchange may be just one leg of a much longer journey toward achieving the development goal. The importance of this segment of the journey will depend on how well you can demonstrate the exchange moved participants farther along toward the desired change.

Reporting on Long-term Exchange Initiatives

Large knowledge exchange efforts (i.e., those involving various instruments and spanning years) require a different approach than smaller, short-term exchanges. In these cases, you need to develop a monitoring plan to examine the initiative’s direct results and influence at multiple stages. These stories take longer to develop but often have more substance. If possible, describe how one or two individual participants have benefited and applied their learning from one exchange to the next. Personal stories add depth to the numbers and analysis.