The best duo: program design and program evaluation
It’s often the case that evaluation can feel detached from the program its seeking to assess. Why? It was likely an afterthought during program development. Here’s why bringing in evaluation from the beginning matters:
Using research methods in evaluation helps ensure you draw valid and reliable conclusions about your project outcomes. Collecting the right data at the right time points matters if you want to show you’ve made an impact. But when evaluation is an afterthought, it can weaken the conclusions we can draw about our program impact.
When you don’t plan your evaluation, it can often add extra work or burden for participants. If you plan your evaluation in alignment with program activities, you can embed methods of data collection within the existing stream of program activity. Have an application for the program or project? You can use it to collect “pre” data — but only if you plan in advance.
Evaluation allows you to have a continued line of sight to the intended outcomes throughout the project. **Evaluation of your program or project encourages your team to articulate your project goals and set boundaries, so that the project stays on track. It also allows you to course correct or modify your approach or activities based on what is and isn’t working, and what you’re learning.
Without evaluation of project outcomes, there is no meta-analyses of impacts. The National Science Foundation says that there is difficulty in assessing broader impacts at the field level, without ensuring there is evaluation at the project/program level. Building evaluation in at the beginning ensures that there is alignment between the project-specific data collected and the indicators that are important to the larger field.
Evaluation requires a toolbox of specific skills and knowledge. **Considering evaluation in the beginning enables you to ensure you have the resources and tools you need to do assessment.
If there is anything I have learned in my decade+ of evaluation work, it’s that evaluation should always be thoughtfully considered, alongside your project, program, or convening design (and also built in to the proposal for funding). In my experience, this allowed for teams to glean the deepest insights and learnings about their program activities and outcomes, and it also gave project teams more agency on what data is collected, how it’s collected, and what questions could ultimately be answered.
