Program Evaluation

These tips have been designed to be especially useful to coalitions that work with youth and youth prevention programs.  We hope they will be useful to others who are beginning to think about evaluation.

We developed these tips through our work with the Lowell Teen Coalition and the Lowell Community Outreach Partnership Center.  We piloted them through a Technical Assistance Night and discovered that in our community these tips are quite useful.

This first volume of tips includes the following topics that we think you might find useful. Also see our tips on evaluating after-school programs.

• How to Do an Internal or External Evaluation
• How to Focus an Evaluation
• Steps You Can Take to Make Certain That an Evaluation Captures What Your Program Does
• Choosing an Evaluator and Developing a Scope of Services
• Designing an Evaluation: Issues to Consider
• Now We Have Some Evaluation Findings: How Do We Use Them to Improve the Program
• Understanding the Overall Program: Logic Models Make It Easier to Run Towards the Goal
• Collecting Evaluation Data: Knowing Enough About the Types to Decide What’s Right for Your Program
• Looking for Other Kinds of Existing Data: Using Community-Wide Indicators in an Evaluation
• Comparing Your Program Against the Best: Using “Best Practices” in Evaluations
• It’s Not Enough to Collect the Data: Presenting Evaluation Findings So That They Will Make a Difference
• Getting What You Want & Need From an Evaluation: Communication is the Key
• Program Slippage: How to Use Program Evaluation to Address the Challenge

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