Make me a match: Creating research partnerships to build capacity for the evaluation of community initiatives.

Introduction: While organizations leading community initiatives play a crucial role in tackling public health challenges, their difficulties in designing rigorous evaluations often undermine the strength of their proposals and diminish their chances of securing funding. We developed a matching service funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Evidence for Action program to bridge these gaps. This service identified matched applicants involved in community-engaged research with evaluation experts to provide complementary expertise, strengthen evaluation capacity, and enhance participants' ability to secure funding. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of the pilot phase of the Accelerating Collaborations for Evaluation Matching Service from August 2018 to February 2021. Data sources included program records, participant surveys administered at 3-, 6-, and 12-months post-match, and semi-structured interviews conducted at 12-18 months post-match. We assessed outcomes such as match success, resubmissions, funding rates, and participant satisfaction. Results: Over the 2.5-year pilot period, the matching service successfully matched 20 of 24 referred applicants. Among these, 50% submitted revised proposals, and a third of secured funding. Survey results indicated widespread satisfaction with the partnerships. One-year interviews highlighted complementary expertise, bidirectional learning, and capacity-building as key benefits of these partnerships. Conclusion: This pilot demonstrated the feasibility, acceptability, and impact of the matching service in creating rewarding collaborations for community-engaged researchers. Beyond funding outcomes, participants uniformly valued the partnerships and described them as mutually satisfying. This model offers a scalable approach to creating research partnerships to build capacity for the evaluation of community initiatives.