Element C. Define Evaluation Purpose & Questions

Evaluations can serve many purposes. Gaining clarity on your reasons for evaluating a program informs how you will design and conduct it. 

Evaluations can serve one or more purposes, which broadly fall into these three categories.

  • Front-end evaluations investigate what community members and others who affect or are affected by a program want, know, think, or expect from a program before you design it. Needs assessments are a type of front-end evaluation. By understanding the community and its needs from the beginning, program providers and their partners can co-create programs in, with, and for communities that are more equitable and culturally relevant.
  • Process evaluations examine how well a program is being implemented. You might evaluate the effectiveness of your activities and instructional materials, the suitability of sites and facilities, or the recruitment and preparation of staff and volunteers. Process evaluations are also appropriate to examine how to make your programs more culturally relevant, engage staff volunteers who better represent the people and communities that you serve, or broaden your community reach.
  • Outcome evaluations examine the degree to which a program achieves its intended outcomes and can provide insights on why or why not. You might evaluate if and how your program has benefited participants in equitable or disparate ways. Outcome evaluations can reveal if program  strategies and activities reinforce or curtail structural inequities. Effective outcome evaluations reveal unintended consequences or outcomes, as well as those that were intended.

Another way of defining your evaluation’s purpose relates to how and when your results will be used.

  • Utilization-focused evaluations are designed  with careful consideration of how all aspects of the evaluation process, from beginning to end, will affect use. Use concerns how real people in the real world apply evaluation findings and experience and learn from the evaluation process (Patton, 2012).
  • Formative evaluations yield findings while a program is being implemented. They help you to understand what is working well and where improvement can be made, while there is an opportunity to make adjustments. They can also explore disparities in how a program is reaching participants or members of a community.
  • Summative evaluations yield findings after a program has concluded and at milestones in the implementation of established or ongoing programs. They make judgments on how effective a program was at meeting its intended outcomes and offer insights on program strengths and areas for improvement.

Evaluation questions are used to guide your evaluation process. They serve as a compass for what will be included in the evaluation and what is beyond its scope. They should be relevant to your participants and the community being served, as well as program partners. It is best to collaborate with your program partners, participants, funders, and others when crafting these questions, to understand what is most important to everyone involved and why.

 

Tips to Embed CREE

 

C1. Define Your Evaluation Purpose 

Collaborate with program participants and partners to define and understand the reasons for evaluating your program. Bring a spirit of curiosity and engage a variety of perspectives to understand how the evaluation may affect or be affected by the members of your team, your participants, and the community being served. 

C2. Identify and Prioritize Evaluation Questions

Collaborate with program partners and participants to brainstorm and then prioritize your evaluation’s key guiding questions. When crafting questions, consider what information may be used to answer them. Allow for multiple ways of collecting evidence to capture participants’ varied experiences as well as different ways of knowing and communicating. Work with your program partners to prioritize your evaluation questions. 

C3. Reflect on and Refine Evaluation Questions

Revisit and refine your questions as you design the evaluation, as they may need to be adjusted based on the time and resources available to you and your partners, and the needs of your participants.

 

Resources

Consult these resources that support the Purpose of Evaluation. 

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Children observe bugs

Explore the Values

We encourage you to investigate how each value is incorporated into the evaluation process.

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Bamboo forest

Explore the Evaluation Process

Investigate how the core values can be applied to create more just evaluation processes.