When visiting with organizations about the importance of evaluating their programs, we generally see a lot of enthusiasm. Nonprofits, school districts, and others realize that evaluations:
- Let organizations know what’s working and what’s not
- Give stakeholders a way to provide valuable feedback
- Can give a sense of the impact the program is making
- Save time and money in the long run
Why then, aren’t organizations doing evaluations for EVERY program, EVERY time?
Two things are missing – time & money. Evaluations are often perceived as (and can be) massive behemoths that take hours and hours to conduct and cost quite a bit of money.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We have recently been working on a method to produce a comprehensive, focused evaluation with a polished final report or professional presentation in just 24 hours.
Of course, you could spend the longest day ever on the evaluation and get (some types) done in one day. But you could also spread those hours out and get a high quality evaluation completed in a week, with 4-6 hours of work a day.
The 24 hour evaluation has 3 phases.
- Phase One: Planning (4 h, Day 1). In this phase, you’ll brainstorm ideas for your evaluation, create a mini-theory of change, select your evaluation questions, and decide on your strategy for data collection.
- Phase Two: Data Collection & Analysis (12 h, Days 2 & 3). In the next phase, you’ll collect data (whether new or existing), clean it up, and analyze it. This is the longest phase, for obvious reasons, and if you choose to collect new data, it will necessarily take longer than one 24-hour day to complete the process.
- Phase Three: Reporting (8 h, Days 4 & 5). In the final phase, you’ll pick a report type (either an evaluation brief or a presentation), write your content, edit, and publish or present.
A few caveats:
- The number of evaluation questions asked will be small and targeted. This may look like one deep question or several small questions.
- If you are planning on writing a report, the report will be a brief report of 5 pages with an additional one-pager summary. There’s not time to write a 30 page report in 24 hours! An evaluation brief, when written carefully, can actually be more effective than a long report because people are more likely to actually pick it up and read it.
- If you are planning to do interviews and focus groups, you will use a rapid analysis method – no time to transcribe tapes and upload themes into nVivo or some other analysis software. Instead, you’ll be pulling out the big and consistent messages that you’ve heard.
With this method, 90% of what your organization needs to do to make real, meaningful change could be done in one work week spread over 24 hours.
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