Information gathered through an evaluation has five functions:37
- 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. The evaluation process assesses the functioning of your group, allowing partners to know what the others are doing, how this work fits with their own actions and goals, and what opportunities exist for working together in the future.
- 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 only to address the requirement rather than to provide a functional flow of information among partners and supporters. To accomplish the five functions of evaluation, you need a more comprehensive and well-rounded evaluation process in which you provide the needed information to the appropriate stakeholders so that they make better choices (improvement), work more 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).