What?
A place to map out your plan for conducting an evaluation for a particular program, project or initiative
Why?
- To get clear on what you are hoping to learn and why
- To guide program evaluation activities
Who?
A Program Manager or program team member with some experience of evaluation, sometimes in collaboration with an evaluation staff member within the organization or an external professional evaluation consultant
When?
The earlier the better, but the reality is that these often get developed at the end of a program and that is just fine
Where?
On a computer in a shared document that the full program team can access
How?
- Copy our Evaluation Plan Template into your own files and begin filling in the blanks
- Logo: Add your organization’s and/or program’s logo onto the first page
- About the program: Share some information about your program including who it is designed for/with and the BIG CHANGES it is helping to bring about as well as program outcomes
- Evaluation questions: Define your evaluation questions – these are the big questions that your evaluation is trying to answer (as opposed to specific questions you might ask in a survey)
- Evaluation users: Identify your evaluation users and specify what they are going to use the information gathered for (e.g. program staff: to improve the program over time; private donors: to determine whether they want to continue to donate to the program)
- Evaluation tools and data sources: Decide what is the best way to gather information you need to answer your evaluation questions and who you have to ask or where you have to look to gather that information (e.g. online survey with program participants; focus group with volunteers)
- Reporting findings: Think about how and when you are going to share evaluation findings with evaluation users and ideally back with respondents as well
- Respect and ethics: Brainstorm how you can ensure that participating in your evaluation is a respectful and safe process for participants (Check out our Tips for Respectful and Ethical Evaluation for some ideas)
- Use to guide your evaluation
- Share your Evaluation Plan with your team for input and refine
