All tagged Evaluation
Evaluation work is extremely important, and getting it right matters. Good evaluation allows you to know whether or not your efforts are effectively helping you reach your goals, and whether or not you’re making best use of scarce resources. If it turns out your programs aren’t as effective or efficient as you thought – it doesn’t mean you’ve failed. In fact, your evaluation can be used to make any necessary adjustments, learn from your experiences, and improve your offerings in the future.
When you find yourself in need of some high-quality, qualitative data about your programs or projects, a great evaluative tool to use is a focus group. A focus group is a method of gathering meaningful insights and opinions from a small group of carefully selected individuals who participate in a guided group discussion. Its purpose is to identify and understand more in-depth perceptions of a program or service than simple survey questions may answer. Read more to find out how to plan and hold a focus group.
The summer months are here, and for many organizations, this is a natural transition period into a new cycle of summer programming. If this is the case for your organization, this transition period can be a great opportunity to check in and check up on your organization’s evaluation practices and processes. Here are 4 easy tips to follow, to set yourself on the right track.
SMART Goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, and Timebound. It’s useful to think of evaluation as part of a cycle. This allows us to consider the evaluation process at the start of a program cycle. There are many benefits to approaching evaluation this way – the most important being that gathering data and information becomes so much easier throughout the program cycle.
