Evaluate Together

STEP 3: Determine what participants want to learn from the evaluation.

People involved in an evaluation usually want to learn what was achieved and what was not achieved, how, why, and at what cost. Beyond this, they may want to compare this effort with others and extract lessons to apply in the future. What the various stakeholders want to learn from an evaluation is often rooted in their roles and responsibilities in relation to the effort. For example, if you are a donor, your primary interest may be in learning whether the money that was invested was well spent—you want to see results. If you are a program manager, you want to know what contributed to success and failure and how to improve the program in the future.

Ideally, each representative on the evaluation team will have a chance to meet with his or her respective group to discuss what the group wants to learn from the evaluation before the evaluation team develops a detailed plan, tools, and methods. Your team can support this step by making this one of the first tasks team members undertake. You may want to brainstorm with team members what questions they should ask their respective groups to elicit the groups’ concerns. It may be as simple as one question, such as “What do we want to know and learn from this evaluation?” or the team may want to explore specific areas of inquiry with their groups, such as: “What do we want to know about our capacity to improve our community’s health? What do we want to know about health outcomes? What do we want to know about our other achievements? What do we need to know to improve our performance? What other aspects of our lives have been affected by our participation in this project? How?” Before going through this exercise with the evaluation team and later with their groups, it is helpful to review the project goals and objectives with the team and the group participants.

Throughout this manual, we have discussed the importance of improving health outcomes and strengthening a community’s capacity to sustain these improvements and apply what we have all learned to other aspects of our lives. With this in mind, your evaluation team may want to consider looking at outcomes in three broad categories: health outcomes, social change or community capacity outcomes, and outcomes related to underlying health factors. We will take up each type of outcome below.

Health Outcomes
Social change: community capacity outcomes
Outcomes affecting underlying contributing factors to health problems and conditions
Setting Priorities