Interact held a workshop with representatives from Interreg programmes working on and with evaluations to discuss current challenges in their evaluation process – and also to discover the opportunities provided by an evaluation.

The main objective of the first day was to exchange with colleagues from other Interreg programmes on the procedure, challenges and lessons learned when drafting Evaluation Terms of References (ToR):

• What are the advantages and lessons learned of having one ToR for all evaluations planned for your programme in this programming period? 
• What are the advantages and lessons learned of having several ToRs for the different evaluations planned for your programme in this programming period? 

On the second first findings from several evaluations were presented by Interreg programmes: what were the challenges and are the lessons learned from the evaluations you have carried out in this period so far? What can be improved for evaluations still to be conducted? How can the operational evaluation be used as a preparation, as input for the impact evaluation?

In addition we also followed up on our discussions on indicators, which we have started at our previous evaluation events. We presented existing output libraries of Interreg programmes and then discussed how a joint output library of all Interreg programmes could/should look like (output library = an approach for a output typology so that data across programmes could be aggregated and also communicated).

Throughout the workshop guidance and feedback were available from representatives from the Evaluation Unit of DG Regio.

Videos from the event are available here.