Is your program working? How do you know?

How do you know that your program is effective in meeting the needs of the community you serve? This is perhaps the most important question a nonprofit can answer for themselves, for the people their program serves, and for the donors who support their work.

The best way to answer this question is to understand, measure, and communicate the value of your program with an evaluation.

Before you begin your evaluation, it is essential to create an evaluation plan. A clear understanding of what you are looking at is vital to evaluating and interpreting your findings, so we start by mapping out a plan for what you do and how you will measure its impact on the community.

What is an evaluation plan?

An evaluation plan provides a clear articulation of what your program is trying to change, what your program is doing to change it, and how to track progress and/or measure outcomes to show the program’s effectiveness.

In a program evaluation, you will systematically collect information about program activities and objectives, monitor progress, and report/communicate results to partners, stakeholders, and the community. 

Why should you have an evaluation plan?

You’ve started a program or initiative with intention of addressing the problem you see in the world. Your initiative has finally gotten off the ground. Congratulations!

If your program is working perfectly in every way, you deserve the satisfaction of knowing that. If adjustments need to be made to guarantee success, you want to know about them so you can jump in and keep your hard work of organizing and initiating the program from going to waste. And, in the worst-case scenario, you’ll want to know if the program is an utter failure so you can re-direct your precious resources more effectively. For these reasons, evaluation is extremely important.

Stakeholders want to know how many people were served by your program, and whether the program had the community-level impact it intended to have. 

Developing your evaluation plan.

Take time to think about what you want to know about your program. Your evaluation plan should address simple questions that are important to the community, your staff, and your funding partners. The best way to ensure that you have the most productive evaluation possible is to develop an evaluation plan.

We recommend that you clearly define the following items before getting started with an evaluation plan:

Program Mission: What change do you want to see in the world?

What are the goals and objectives of your program? What is the program intended to accomplish? What outcomes do you intend to achieve with this program?

           Example: Improved health of community members with diabetes.

Program Activities: What does your program do to achieve the changes you want to see?

These are the actions and processes put into place to execute objectives. Ideally, program activities will align with the outcomes described above. 

           Example: Providing a low-cost health care program and offering free educational seminars in the community you wish to impact. 

Data Collection: How can you systematically measure what your program achieves?

Select key outcomes and specific ways to measure them. Don’t waste time measuring things that do not show how you’re achieving the goals and objectives. 

If improved health of community members with diabetes was the intended outcome, it’s not important to measure how many snacks were served and at what cost at the community outreach event. Measure instead, for example, improved lab results over the 6 months of participation in the program.

Plan how you will gather the data. Qualitative information includes data that can be counted. Qualitative data, such as that gathered through focus groups, interviews, or observation can be used to highlight opportunities for improvement, lessons learned, best practices, and strengths.

Some data-gathering options related to the community diabetes clinic, for example, could be pre-test/post-test results of diabetes awareness educational events, or focus groups about participant satisfaction with program services, or electronic health records (lab results). 

The results of your data collection efforts will provide a means of demonstrating program progress and impact to its members and the community.

If you are a nonprofit leader faced with evaluating your program’s effectiveness, we hope this brief article has provided you with the foundational knowledge you need to get started. If you’d like help with the process of planning and implementing a full-scale impact evaluation, consider the experts at LaBarbera Learning Solutions. We’re an experienced team of researchers, evaluators, and educators with the expertise needed to demonstrate your program’s impact to stakeholders. See our cost-effective solutions at www.labarberalearning.com