Assessing Your Impact

Approaches to Evaluation

Introduction to Evaluation
Program evaluation is carefully collecting information about a program, or some aspect of a program, in order to learn more about its effectiveness, value, impact and how it could be modified or improved. Program evaluation can include any, or a variety of, at least 35 different types of evaluation, such as needs assessments, accreditation, cost/benefit analysis, effectiveness, efficiency, formative, summative, goal-based, process, outcomes, etc. The type of evaluation undertaken depends on what you want to learn about the program.

Since there is no single, "best" approach to evaluation that can be used in all situations, it is important to decide the purpose of the evaluation, the questions to be answered, and which methods will give usable information. If an evaluation consultant is hired to assist, staff and relevant stakeholders should still play an active role in the development and execution of the evaluation.

One of the first things to think about in determining your approach to evaluation is your general purpose. In her paper "Making Quantitative Program Measures Useful: An Orientation to Evaluation" published in the Fall 1998 issue of The NonProfit Quarterly, Carole Upshur provides a useful description of the different types of evaluation:

Accountable/Reporting
To provide information for the organization and/or its funders as to how it has used the resources allocated; often designed to count services delivered, types of activities accomplished; also cost/expenditure reporting.

Goal/Process Oriented
To provide information on to what extent the organization has met predetermined goals (e.g., hours of service, number of persons served); usually oriented to process indicators, not outcomes.

Program Outcome/Impact
To determine if the original problem which the program was designed to solve has been solved, at least for actual program recipients (e.g., better health, higher reading scores, better self-esteem, less joblessness); can also include assessing the overall impact on the population in need; outcome and impact evaluations often distinguish between short-term goals (to be accomplished by the end of a client's participation in a program) and long-term goals (what happens one, two or even ten years later).

Experimental
To advance our state of knowledge about causal relationships between interventions and impacts or outcomes; usually an evaluation that combines process and outcome measures and requires a control group or information from other sources beyond current program in order to generate "proof" about the effectiveness of interventions.

Article available at: www.nonprofitquarterly.org

Evaluation should not be conducted simply to prove that a project worked, but also to
improve the way it works.
     - Michael Quinn Patton