Author: Roy Aulie Jacobsen, PhD research fellow at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences.
In his latest guest blog, Roy Aulie Jacobsen, reflects on a simple but often overlooked point: many evaluation challenges begin at the briefing stage. Drawing on recent conversations across the field, they suggest five questions to help ensure briefs set realistic expectations from the start.
A shared thread
Reading a couple of the most recent blog posts made me think about a problem that often starts early in evaluation, but is only noticed later.
Andrew Meakin asks who gets to decide what “good” involvement looks like. He argues that involvement should not be judged by fixed rules alone, but by shared understanding with the people taking part. A recent UK Evaluation Society post on AI in evaluation makes a similar point in a different way. General principles matter, but they do not answer the awkward questions that come up in real commissioning. Andi Fugard’s post on explaining evaluation to the public points the same way again: if evaluation matters, it needs to be explained in words people can understand.
When are expectations set?
What links these posts, at least to me, is a simple question: when are expectations for an evaluation set? Very often, they are set in the brief.
That matters because many evaluation problems begin before any data are collected. A brief asks whether a program worked, whether it offered value for money, and whether it should be expanded. But the timeline is short. The baseline is weak. The data are patchy. The results may not show up yet. At that point, the problem is not only about methods. The brief may already be asking for a stronger answer than the evaluation can honestly give.
A brief is often treated as routine paperwork. It sets out deadlines, budgets, deliverables, and reporting points. But it also does something more important. It helps decide what kind of answer the evaluation is expected to produce.
When questions and expectations don’t align
In practice, that can mean very different things. A brief might ask what happened. It might ask how something seems to work. It might ask whether a program helped bring about change. Or it might ask whether the program caused the change. These are not the same question. They need different evidence, different designs, and different levels of certainty.
The problem is that briefs often slide across all of them.
That is how disappointment gets built in. A brief may ask for impact, but only fund a short study with no baseline and no credible comparison. It may ask for value for money before results have had time to appear. It may ask for strong causal conclusions when only cautious learning is possible. When that happens, frustration later on is not surprising. The problem was there from the start.
Five questions to ask
One simple way to reduce that risk is to ask five questions before the brief is signed off.
First, what decision is this evaluation meant to inform?
Second, what kind of answer is actually needed?
Third, what evidence would be needed to support that answer?
Fourth, what can the available time, budget, data, and access realistically support?
Fifth, what will the findings need to do once the work is finished?
These questions will not solve everything. But they do make a more honest conversation possible. They make it harder to ask for proof when only early learning is possible. They also make it easier to spot when a brief sounds more ambitious than the design behind it.
The brief as the first design decision
That is one reason the recent UK Evaluation Society conversation matters. If involvement should be shaped with people rather than imposed on them, if awkward questions need to be raised early, and if evaluation should be explained in plain language, then the brief deserves more attention than it usually gets. It is one of the first places where expectations are set about what kind of answer is being bought, who it is for, and how much certainty it can honestly carry.
A method cannot rescue a question that was badly commissioned.
In many evaluations, the most important design decision is made before the method is chosen. It is the decision about what kind of knowledge the evaluation is expected to produce, and whether the design can honestly support it.
How to cite this article
Aulie Jacobsen, J (2026) Five questions before you sign an evaluation brief. UK Evaluation Society blog. Available at: https://evaluation.org.uk/five-questions-before-you-sign-an-evaluation-brief/ (Accessed: [insert date]).
Our thanks to Roy Aulie Jacobsen for this guest blog and for contributing their perspective to the UK Evaluation Society’s work.
Roy Aulie Jacobsen
PhD Fellow in Political and Crisis Communication | YECREA Representative – ECREA Mediatization & Society Section | Data-Driven Insights | Strategic Messaging & Framing
Roy Aulie Jacobsen is a PhD research fellow working at the intersection of political communication, political science, and sociology, with a primary focus on strategic messaging from political leaders and their crisis response. His work centres on understanding how political actors communicate under pressure—whether during elections, public health emergencies, or high-stakes policy reforms.
