Check out our events and workshops.

Evaluation and Evidence Training Series

This training series is a continuing partnership between the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team (OMB) and OES. All trainings will be held via webinar on Zoom for Government. These workshops are for Federal Executive Branch employees only. Register online for upcoming workshops and see resources from past workshops at the MAX.gov site.

Past federal workshops

Evaluation 101

An introduction to evaluation as a method to answer important questions, including what it is, what questions it can and cannot answer, and how it can help agencies better understand their programs, policies, and operations.

  • Wednesday, January 17, 2024 from 3:00 - 4:30 pm ET

Evaluating Customer Experience Efforts

Agency representatives will showcase how evaluation is integrated into the implementation of the CX life experience pilots. The cross-agency teams will describe the varied approaches to evaluate these initiatives and build evidence on outcomes associated with improving the customer experience.

  • August 16, 2023

What to Do When You Can’t Randomize

While randomized experiments are the best way to prove a program’s impact, they are not always feasible. This workshop will explore other research designs that can help evaluators understand a program’s impact.

  • July 19, 2023

Evaluating Agency Equity Initiatives

As agencies implement Equity Action Plans, this workshop will highlight approaches to evaluating activities on these plans, including those related to DEIA activities, to determine whether they are having their intended effects and offer about how agencies can evaluate these activities moving forward.

  • May 17, 2023

Why Randomize? A Case Study

This presentation uses an interactive case study to motivate the need for rigorous evaluation and familiarize participants with various impact evaluation methodologies.

  • April 19, 2023

Conducting Research and Evaluation with Tribal Communities

Agencies will showcase strategies to conduct research and evaluation with tribal communities, focusing on the Administration for Children and Families’ efforts to build a new narrative on research and evaluation in Native communities through bi-directional partnerships between programmatic experts and evaluators.

  • February 15, 2023

Creative Uses of Administrative Data

Highlights creative and innovative ways that agencies have used administrative data to conduct evaluations and build evidence.

  • January 18, 2023

Creative Uses of Administrative Data

Highlights creative and innovative ways that agencies have used administrative data to conduct evaluations and build evidence.

  • May 18, 2022

Evaluating Large Investments

Agencies will share their approaches to evaluating grant-funded programs with a specific focus on agencies’ strategies to evaluate large investments from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act.

  • December 14, 2022

Evaluation 101

In partnership with the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team, OES offered Evaluation 101, an introduction to evaluation for Federal staff. This workshop served as an introduction to evaluation as a method to answer important questions, including what evaluation is, what questions it can and cannot answer, and how it can help agencies better understand their programs, policies, and operations.

  • April 20, 2022
  • October 27, 2021

Understanding Null Results

This workshop dispelled misconceptions about null results and highlight different uses for and lessons from null results.

  • Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Why Randomize? A Case Study

This interactive session, presented by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab - North America, walked participants through a real‐life case.

  • August 3, 2021

Introduction to Formative and Process Evaluations

Formative and Process Evaluations can be important tools for assessing whether a program is appropriate and feasible in a given context, and understanding how a program is working. This workshop provided an introduction to common tools and methodologies used in these types of evaluations.

  • June 15, 2021

Past OES Events

OES@100: Celebrating 100 Collaborations Across Government

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

image OES celebrated completing 100 collaborations across government this year. Distinguished speakers discussed insights gained from OES’ evaluation portfolio to date and future priorities for evidence-building.

  • Panel 1: What leads to a successful evaluation? Reflections from 100 OES collaborations
  • Panel 2: Portfolio of evidence on equity and economic recovery
  • Panel 3: New frontier for evidence in government: what’s next?

What is the impact of applying behavioral insights in government?

Discussion of positive findings from a recent large-scale review

Join OES in a discussion of the impact of behavioral insights in government. UC Berkeley’s Elizabeth Linos will present their findings from a massive review of behavioral interventions in federal and local government. Members of the Office of Evaluation Sciences and the Behavioral Insights Team, along with federal experts, will share reactions and offer thoughts on next steps.

The recent paper “RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units” analyzes how effective behaviorally informed interventions were in 126 trials across many policy areas and involving 24 million people. The researchers found an overall effect of these interventions to be statistically significant and positive at 1.4 percentage points, which translates to a relative increase of 8.1% on priority program and policy outcomes. Notably, 87% of the OES interventions analyzed were of no marginal cost or low cost, suggesting that applying behavioral insights can be very cost effective.

In addition to discussing the findings in detail, the conversation will underline the value of sharing all results — positive, negative and null — so that we are able to get a clearer and more accurate picture of impacts, and offer guidance to help us design better interventions and evaluations in the future and help give a more realistic picture of possible impacts and outcomes.

  • Friday, December 18 from 12:00-1:00PM EST via Zoom.
    Audience: Federal employees, academics, interested public [No press]

Using evidence: Learning from low-cost federal evidence building activities

The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and numerous agency collaborators presented on how the federal government uses low-cost evaluations, unexpected results, and administrative data to inform policy and program decisions. OES staff, collaborators from multiple agencies, and distinguished academic partners presented new results and lessons learned from over 10 OES evaluations in three sessions: Learning from Low-Cost Evaluations, Learning from Unexpected Results, and Learning from Administrative Data. All sessions included information and examples relevant to meeting the requirements of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act)

  • October 30, 2019 at GSA