The following steps have been developed using established practices in pre-evaluation assessments. They can be used to determine whether or not your organization’s program is ready to be evaluated and provide guidance when you begin to design instruments and gather data.
STEP 1: Identify the Question
Once you had identified the program you want to evaluate, solidifying the main questions you want to answer is crucial to ensuring that the evaluation fits your organization’s needs. There should be agreement about what it is specifically that you want to know about the program and the uses of the evaluation. Perhaps the organization simply wants to know more about the program, or maybe the results will be used to inform an important decision. These questions will be helpful for maintaining focus during the evaluation process.
STEP 2: Identify Stakeholders
Stakeholders play a key role in the evaluation through their relationship with the program as a staff member, donor, or client. It is important to identify who wants the information from the evaluation, why they want it, and how they intend to use it. Stakeholders can be internal, staff, donors, or clients and each will have different perceptions of the program and expectations for the type of information they will receive from the evaluation. In addition, there may be other groups or individuals that may use your information, and it is important to consider how information could be used (or misused) in this case.
STEP 3: Challenges and Opportunities
Organizations need to be realistic about the scope and limits of the evaluation project. Part of assessing the evaluability of a program consists of listing and confronting barriers as well as opportunities that will be presented during the evaluation process. Examples of challenges and opportunities are as follows:
Barriers:
• Resources including time, information, cost, people, measurability of outcomes,
• Realities or context for useability of results (political, economic),
• and resist to change, organizational culture.
Opportunities:
• Better understanding of the program and
• build positive relationships with stakeholders
STEP 4: Logic Model
Once you had identified the program you want to evaluate, solidifying the main questions you want to answer is crucial to ensuring that the evaluation fits your organization’s needs. There should be agreement about what it is specifically that you want to know about the program and the uses of the evaluation. Perhaps the organization simply wants to know more about the program, or maybe the results will be used to inform an important decision. These questions will be helpful for maintaining focus during the evaluation process.
STEP 5: Think About Data
Finally, you can begin to think about data. As you move into the next stages of evaluation, it will be important to be familiar with the information resources that are available to help answer your initial evaluation questions. This is also vital to the next step in which you must choose the methods you will use in your evaluation. Browsing available databases and literature will help you get a sense for the information available on the type of program you will evaluate. You may also need to consider where you will get data if it is currently not available, if the type of data you are looking for can be actually be collected, and if the availability of data affects the time or cost of the process.
STEP 6: Create a Plan
The design of the study will be largely determined by the questions being asked. Hopefully, consideration of these questions has also revealed any major barriers or issues that must be addressed before beginning evaluation. The last step is to consider the information collected during the EA process to begin designing the evaluation, choosing tools and methods, and gathering data. Finally, the evaluation plan should address stakeholder needs, use valid and reliable data, contribute to your organization, and can be implemented.
Final Tips
- Stay focused on your questions. Make sure you know how the answers to these questions will be used.
- Use a detailed checklist like this one to guide you through the EA process and into the formal evaluation.
- Use relevant past evaluations where they are useful. This will save time and money.
- Be realistic about your resources and barriers.
- If you find your program is not ready for evaluation, that is ok! The process can still be valuable and useful!
