Making the Most of Evaluation Findings
By Lindsay Anderson, Consultant, evaluation expert, MSW, LGSW
So, you did an evaluation and you have recommendations, but NOW WHAT?!
In a previous blog, I wrote about Why Evaluation is Important to Your NonProfit. We know that evaluation helps to hold your program and organization accountable to all your stakeholders including funders, board members, staff, and the community you serve. But all too often evaluation reports get swept under a pile of paperwork and forgotten about until the next funding cycle. Here are a few strategies to help ensure you put your evaluation to use and make the most of the work you’ve already contributed to the project.
Meet with your stakeholders. Schedule a meeting with your agency stakeholders to go over the evaluation report and its findings. Include stakeholders from various perspectives of the organization including direct service staff, leadership, board members, and even individuals from the community you serve. Bring the evaluation findings back to them and have discussions about what the findings mean for these various groups. Chances are the report/recommendations will mean different things for a board member or a program funder than they do for a participant of the program. All perspectives are valid and all opinions are necessary to ensure the changes you implement will benefit the largest number of people involved.
Acknowledge successes. While evaluation reports are often riddled with recommendations, there should also be notes about what is going well in the program. Take the time to applaud efforts that are working and use this as as opportunity to build upon the strengths the program already has in place.
Prioritize recommendations. An evaluation report, with a multitude of recommendations can be intimidating. Use time during the meeting with stakeholders to rank recommendations in order of importance and impact. In time, your organization may want to find ways to implement all the recommendations suggested in the report. However, focusing on one at a time will help to ensure steps are taken and that sustainable change can occur.
Create an action plan for implementing each recommendation. Be strategic in how you will go about making these changes at various levels of the organization. Identify what action needs to be taken, how it will be implemented in the organization, who is responsible, and set a realistic timeline for it to be complete. Make sure to have a plan for leadership to follow-up on what has been implemented, to what extent recommendations have been adopted, and to help problem solve any challenges that come up.
Plan ahead for future evaluations by incorporating evaluation into workflows and responsibilities. This might mean incorporating evaluation tasks into direct service staff and leadership responsibilities including program tracking and monitoring. It might mean establishing / updating program records for ease of use in future evaluations. It may be helpful to establish a database for evaluation recommendations; archiving discussions of the problems encountered and how they were addressed; and keeping a contact list of who was involved and any other relevant information that might be useful for the next round of work.
While these are just a few strategies you can use internally to help make the most of your evaluation report, it is always helpful to have an unbiased, external perspective. When possible, build in extra time and funding for an external evaluator to collaborate with you and your program to take you beyond the report to actual evaluation implementation and use.