Julia Coffman is founder and director of the Center for Evaluation Innovation, a nonprofit based in Washington D.C. dedicated to pushing evaluation practice in new direction and into new arenas. The Center specializes in areas that are challenging to assess and promotes cutting-edge approaches and methods. For more than 20 years Julia has worked with numerous foundations and nonprofits on their approaches to evaluation, and she has led multiple long-term complex initiative evaluations. Julia has particular expertise in evaluating advocacy and policy efforts, emphasizing real-time learning that helps organizations to adapt their strategies and continuously improve.
For the 15 years prior to founding CEI, she led evaluation efforts at the Harvard Family Research Project, a research and evaluation organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Julia has a graduate degree in justice studies from Arizona State University and an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Authored Content
Oct 16 2019 Blog Post Weaving Learning into the Fabric of Philanthropy: Working Smarter in the Age of Big Data In this data-rich world, are we getting better at learning in philanthropy? Given the growing proliferation of data in our lives—big data, digital data, automated data, etc.—one might assume that our ability to work more effectively as a result of increased information grows at a comparable rate. But research and lived experience suggest otherwise. Consider […]