Guidance

TASK 1: Recognize Each Function of Evaluation

The information you’ll gather through an evaluation has five functions:33

  • Improvement: This is the most important function of an evaluation—improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your chosen strategies and how they are implemented.
  • Coordination: It’s important to assess how your group is functioning. Do all partners know what the others are doing, and how this work fits with their own actions and goals?
  • Accountability: Are the identified outcomes being reached? A good evaluation allows your group to describe its contribution to important population-level change.
  • Celebration: This function is all too often ignored. The path to reducing drug use at the community level is not easy, so a stated aim of any evaluation process should be to collect information that allows your group to celebrate its accomplishments.
  • Sustainability: A thorough evaluation can help you provide important information to the community and various funders, which promotes the sustainability of both your group and its strategies.

Program evaluations often are conducted in response to a grant or other funding requirement. As a result, reporting may be structured to address only those requirements, rather than to provide a functional flow of information among partners and supporters.

In a more comprehensive and well-rounded evaluation process, you provide the needed information to the appropriate stakeholders so that they make better choices (improvement), work closely with your partners (coordination), demonstrate that commitments have been met (accountability), honor your team’s work (celebration), and show community leaders why they should remain invested in the coalition process (sustainability)—thus achieving all five functions of evaluation.

Tool
MOAPC Planning Tool