Welcome to the Planning & Evaluation Resource Center
This website is designed for people who want to do self-evaluations of their youth development programs or who want to understand evaluation better.
Throughout this site you will find tutorials and tools on program planning and evaluation. PERC also has a calendar of training events and lectures relevant to program planning and evaluation, and a nationwide database of people involved in youth development. There is also a section where you can learn more about the creators of this website.
We hope that you will find this site useful. We strongly encourage you to Contact Us to share your evaluation stories and evaluation tools that you find useful and to give us feedback on the content of the site.
If you are familiar with the website and wish to go right to the planning and evaluation cycle click here. You can also search the website.
Below is more information on self-evaluation. After you have familiarized yourself with these ideas, you can click here to begin to use the PERC tutorial to learn more about the evaluation cycle.
What is a self evaluation?
- Self-evaluation is a process for an organization to obtain information on the activities, impacts, and effectiveness of its programs using organizational values, mission, and needs to drive the evaluation. Staff and other stakeholders determine the scope of the evaluation and collectively design an approach to assess program participant's experiences, document activities, and inform practice.
Self-evaluation is an empowerment tool for organizational and social change
Self-evaluations require buy-in from all
stakeholders, including staff.
This website will help everyone
with a stake in the program to learn more about the components of evaluations
so they can understand how to use the results. It will be important that
everyone understands that the evaluation is being conducted to support
your program's efforts.
Self-evaluation gives you a chance to:
- Reflect on your program's effectiveness
- Strategize new approaches
- Refine your practices
While externally imposed evaluations are driven by your funder's needs and priorities, self-evaluation is driven by your organization's mission, values, and needs. This allows for inclusion, self-expression, collaboration, and empowerment.
Evaluations offer many benefits including:
- Identifying strengths and weaknesses of your program activities.
- Improving your organization's ability to plan and implement programs.
- Documenting your programs' progress toward meeting goals.
- Identifying unmet community needs and assessing the impacts of your efforts.
- Providing feedback to staff, volunteer, and participants on their work.
- Reporting to community, funders, and other stakeholders about your
program's effectiveness.
There are different types of evaluations. For our purposes we will look at two different kinds: process evaluations and outcome evaluations.
- Process evaluations document how well your program was implemented and how well your program is functioning. This type of evaluation identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your program.
- Outcome evaluations measure the outcomes and impacts of your
program based on your goals.
Your Evaluation Plan
An evaluation plan guides your evaluation and reflects your organization's values, mission, and goals.
Steps in designing an evaluation plan:
- Determine your resources for an evaluation.
- What will the scale of your evaluation be? The larger the evaluation the more resources that will be required and the costs will need to be budgeted for.
- Who will be involved in the evaluation? Staff time will need to be allocated for self-evaluations.
- How long will the evaluation take? You should be realistic in establishing your timeline. See tools below for a worksheet on estimating time requirements.
- How much will the evaluation cost? If you are using consultants, you should estimate 10-15% of project costs for evaluation. Self-evaluations will require money for design, data collection, analysis, and reporting.
- How will you gather the resources for the evaluation? Volunteers and in-kind services are good resources for self-evaluations to help defray costs.
- Convene a diverse group of your organization's stakeholders.
- You should identify an "evaluation committee" made up of stakeholders such as staff, program participants, volunteers, board members, funders, etc.
- You should identify a person or people to lead the team.
- All stakeholders (including community stakeholders) should be given an opportunity to identify their evaluation priorities.
- Establish the goals and purposes of your evaluation.
These can be at the organizational, program participant, or community level. Examples are:
- Testing program effectiveness
- Making the case to change your program's practices
- Justifying the case for continued funding
- Documenting community change efforts
- Other goals as your stakeholders identify
- Identify evaluation questions.
- Evaluation questions focus on understanding how your program will meet its intended goal.
- Good evaluation questions enable you and others to understand your work better.
- You will need to decide whether you want to focus on the process of your work or the outcomes of your work (see above for the difference)
- Make your questions simple and clear.
- Focus on the specific aspects of your program that you want to
understand better.
Sample Evaluation Questions:
These questions are sample questions that could be used in an evaluation of an after-school homework center.- What skills are program participants learning through our program?
- What program activities are most effective in teaching youth strong reading skills?
- How aware is the community of our program?
- What benefit does our program provide to the community?
- Review existing data sources.
- What type of data do you already have? Samples include information about the number of people served, demographic information, program feedback reports, etc.
- What questions will you be able to answer with existing data? Build off the data you have to avoid duplication.
- What additional information will you need to collect? After organizing the information you have, you can identify areas where you will need to collect new data.
Common Data Collected by Organizations:
Program participant characteristics
Age, race, socioeconomic status, gender, level of involvement with program.
Program activity
Attendance at program events, # of participants served.
Program level information
Volunteer participation (# of volunteers, # of hours volunteered, etc.), costs of program, effectiveness of program, staff effectiveness and retention.
Youth outcomes
Short and long term changes in participants' knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and/or outcomes
Community impact
Knowledge of program, benefits of program, changes in policies or resources for program participants, changes in people's perceptions of participants.
- Establish evaluation roles and develop a timeline.
- An evaluation team should be established from a diverse group of stakeholders.
- Each team member should be assigned roles and responsibilities, and there should be some leader or leaders of the evaluation.
- The team should establish a realistic timeline for completing evaluation
activities.
Tools for Evaluation Planning
Social Policy Research Associates - Time Required for Evaluation
Time Required for Evaluation Worksheet (PDF)
This is a worksheet regarding time requirements for evaluation by SPR
for Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development adapted
from Paul W. Mattisch's The Manager's Guide to Program Evaluation, Wilder
Research Center.
Social Policy Research Associates - Taking Stock of Existing Data
Taking Stock of Existing Data Worksheet (PDF)
This is a worksheet developed by SPR for Innovation Center for Community
and Youth Development to help you understand what data you currently have
and what data you will need to collect.
The information in this section was adapted from Social
Policy Research Associates' Evaluation and Civic Activism Curriculum,
Module 1, created for Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development.