Evaluate Together
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STEP 8: Document and share lessons learned and recommendations for the future.
One of the most difficult tasks for busy field workers to carry out is documenting what they have done and the results of their efforts, a requirement often set by donors or other stakeholders. When such requirements don’t exist, the team has even less incentive to complete project and evaluation documentation. If there is so much work to be done in the field, the logic goes, why take precious time away to document our experience and the lessons we’ve learned? In addition, many communities and organizations engaged in fieldwork undervalue their rich experience, believing that what they have learned may be obvious to others or might not be of interest to anyone else. As a result, information about many effective community-based programs never spreads beyond the local area and those who are just beginning to work in the field find relatively few documented experiences upon which to build.
But this dynamic is beginning to change as information technology becomes more accessible and it becomes easier to share field experiences with our colleagues, not only within the same community, district and country, but more broadly with our peers in other countries. This is a great opportunity to promote global sharing and learning.
But whom should this information be shared with and in what form? If you refer back to Step 1 of this phase, you will recall the list of stakeholders you identified who wanted to learn from this evaluation. This list is the core of your audience. In Step 3, we identified what each of these audiences wanted to learn from the evaluation; using this information, you can now develop a summary of the results tailored to these groups’ particular needs. If the needs are very similar, you may only have to develop one or two reports and /or presentations; if the needs are quite different, you may have to tailor your feedback to the audience. The sample documentation matrix presented below is one common way to organize this kind of information for your stakeholders (an expanded version appears in the tools for this phase).
| Stakeholder/audience | Learning interest | Purpose of documentation/dissemination | Material/method of dissemination |
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| Policy makers in MOH | How MOH policies inhibit or enhance service delivery at the community level | To inform health policies | One-page briefing paper summary on policy implications Full evaluation report with Executive Summary 1.5 hour presentation of evaluation results and discussion on policy implications Article published in local technical journal |
However you decide to proceed, it is worth discussing with your team how you would like to contribute to the greater body of knowledge and experience aimed at improving health through community mobilization and change.
          
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