It is not uncommon for Project Managers to contact me halfway through their project or worse, near the end. Unfortunately evaluation is often an after thought – perhaps something that was hastily included in the funding application and then forgotten about until much later. Don’t panic if this is you – You can still create a useful evaluation, but you have missed some valuable opportunities. Planning your evaluation early enables you to:

1.   Compare your ‘Before & After’

If you want to measure the impact of your project or intervention then you should ideally take a benchmark measure first, so you can understand what changes your project brings about. e.g By finding out people’s knowledge about a certain heritage site before they come and visit, compared with what they know after their visit.

2. Adopt a participatory approach

Participatory evaluation is when your project stakeholders or participants work together as a group to develop the project’s measures of success. They are actively involved in assessing and make decisions, and can even collect data. It might be facilitated by an outsider but is very much focused in serving the project community. This approach cannot be taken retrospectively and needs to be planned in from the beginning.

3. Use your findings to improve the project delivery

By planning your evaluation early you can build in formative evaluation questions to help you assess your progress during your development or early stages of the project. This can provide great feedback to make tweaks to your practice and approach, to better achieve your project aims. e.g Heritage Educators might like to know which of their workshop activities are most engaging and fun so they can build in what will be popular with their audience.

4. Ask the right questions, get the right data

By the end of the project you have missed some great opportunities to collect evidence from your participants. By asking questions about peoples experience while they are having the experience you often get more realistic feedback. Response rates to surveys fall the more the time has past since the event. If you know your key research questions early you can include meaningful ways to collect the evidence you need to answer these at each stage of the delivery.

5. Get valuable insight to use in other areas of your organisation

Evaluating a project often prompts organisations to gather really useful information that they otherwise might not gather. Evaluation findings can feed into your other core areas such as audience development, market research, partnership building, fundraising, budgeting and promotion. E.g. Quotes from audience feedback can make convincing content for newsletters, or findings can be incorporated into grant proposals to prove your impact. By planning early you can help your evaluation to fertilize other areas of your work.

6. Ensure you have the right resources for the task

Evaluation should ideally be budgeted for when the program budget is being planned. Evaluation is not a quick and fast endeavor. Collecting and analyzing data across a robust range of indicators can be time consuming, Such as scrutinizing hundreds of questionnaires. It can also take specialist skills, such as leading a focus group or interpreting arts based outputs such as drawings. By building consensus in your project team about the value of evaluation early on you can help secure the finances and resources it needs to succeed.

Contact me now to see how you can get the most out of your project evaluation by planning it alongside your project planning.