Grantees on national projects are often required by their funders to take part in evaluation activities. While the requirement can encourage compliance, grantees can feel overburdened and disempowered with their evaluation experience. Evaluators in a national cross-site evaluation utilized multiple strategies for obtaining buy-in of participating grantees: (1) an initial evaluation needs assessment to foster a collaborative partnership and inform a plan for capacity building; (2) an ‘evaluation summit’ to facilitate input on the evaluation framework and cross-site measures, encourage relationship-building and evaluation ownership; (3) an Evaluation Advisory Committee to further on-going input and negotiations on evaluation methods and measures; (4) tailored and timely evaluation technical assistance to build capacity and promote peer exchange; and (5) integration of technology (PDAs) to alleviate data collection burden and improve data quality. Use of these methods increased overall grantee trust in the evaluators and buy-in on the evaluation, their increased capacity in evaluation, their expected future investment in evaluation and the availability of data to benefit their agency and clients. It also resulted in the development of acceptable outcomes, measures and instruments for the evaluation, timely IRB approval and increased quality and timeliness of collected data over time. While labor-intensive and challenging, the evaluators found that frequent and creative engagement of stakeholders in the evaluation yielded important benefits both for the evaluators and for grantees. Although these methodologies have direct relevance for evaluators working on large multisite evaluations, they are also applicable to evaluators who are working on smaller, single-site assessments.