GGI routinely takes our expertise in program evaluation and applies it to the evaluation of policies. While the skills are transferable, there are important differences and nuances between program and policy evaluation. One is the target audience. Policy evaluations have policies that firstly target the organization itself rather than external beneficiaries (although these external audiences are the eventual beneficiaries of government policies). Another is the absence of a set of services that can be easily evaluated. With policy evaluation, it is often an entire system to be evaluated rather than a program defined by a set of services. Also, the set of stakeholders to be consulted differs with policy evaluation insofar as they are usually within the organization and a fairly narrow set of individuals since those not directly implicated by the policy are likely not aware of it.
GGI has been actively conducting policy evaluations for several years for the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Sport Canada, Innovation and Economic Development Canada, among others.