● Determine and secure resources: What resources (time, money, and expertise) will be needed for the evaluation and how can they be obtained? Consider both internal (e.g. staff time) and external (e.g. previous participants’ time) resources. ● Define ethical and quality evaluation standards: What will be considered a high quality and ethical evaluation? How should ethical issues be addressed? ● Document management processes and agreements: How will the evaluation’s management processes and agreements be documented? ● Develop planning documents for the evaluation: What needs to be done to design, plan and implement the evaluation? What planning documents need to be created (evaluation framework, evaluation plan, evaluation design, evaluation work plan)? ● Review evaluation (do meta-evaluation): How will the evaluation itself be evaluated including the plan, process, and report? ● Develop evaluation capacity: How can the ability of individuals, groups and organizations to conduct and use evaluations be strengthened? 2. DEFINE what is to be evaluated Develop a description (or access an existing version) of what is to be evaluated and how it is understood to work. ● Develop initial description: What exactly is being evaluated? ● Develop program theory / logic model: How is the intervention understood to work (program theory, theory of change, logic model)? ● Identify potential unintended results: What are possible unintended results (both positive and negative) that will be important to address in the evaluation? 3. FRAME the boundaries for an evaluation Set the parameters of the evaluation – its purposes, key evaluation questions and the criteria and standards to be used. ● Identify primary intended users: Who are the primary intended users of this evaluation? ● Decide purpose: What are the primary purposes and intended uses of the evaluation? ● Specify the key evaluation questions: What are the high level questions the evaluation will seek to answer? How can these be developed? ● Determine what ‘success’ looks like: What should be the criteria and standards for judging performance? Whose criteria and standards matter? What process should be used to develop agreement about these? 4. DESCRIBE activities, outcomes, impacts and context Collect and retrieve data to answer descriptive questions about the activities of the project/program/ policy, the various results it has had, and the context in which it has been implemented. ● Sample: What sampling strategies will you use for collecting data?
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