Will your evaluation be used?
Your evaluation is more likely to make a difference if:
- it is viewed as impartial and believable
- it has a well-timed completion
- lessons from your evaluation are shared with all of your stakeholders and taken to the community.
Your best messengers for sharing the evaluation results will be your evaluation users,
because they have relationships and roles that will reinforce the recommendations.
You can help them be successful by:
Preparation - Help your evaluation users get reader
for the evaluation results
Your evaluation might have bad news for at least some stakeholders. The people
presenting your evaluation report may have the challenging task of presenting negative
findings and difficult-to-accept recommendations. You can support them by:
- helping them understand the methods you use to collect and analyze the data, and
- talking with them about the positive and negative aspects of the process and possible
results throughout the evaluation.
Communication - Promote trust among users and
stakeholder groups throughout the evaluation
Your evaluation user group may include people with different priorities and
reactions to the evaluation. They are more likely to reach agreement on
key issues if stakeholders trust eachother. You can promote this trust
by keeping everyone informed and by encouraging communication between stakeholders
throughout the evaluation.
Follow-up - Maintain contact with your stakeholders
as they share the evaluation results and recommendations
If you maintain contact with your users as they act on the recommendations, you can
help prevent some of your evaluation's lessons learned from getting lost, misused
or ignored.
Dissemination - Develop a plan for distributing and
explaining results
Presentations of your evaluation results need to have consistent messages and timely
information, and be presented in an unbiased manner. If you and your users
decide how, when and by whom your evaluation results will be shared, the presentations
are more likely to be effective. Your plan could:
Your plan could:
- identify relevant audiences for your evaluation results,
- indicate which users will contact those audiences, and
- describe the materials the users will need for their presentations.
Sometimes stakeholders decide that a complete, written evaluation report is needed as
part of the dissemination plan. Your evaluation users may think that the
results would be more effectively communicated in some other format.
