The Community Tool Box

Our Mission

Promoting community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources

What is evaluation?

Evaluation can take numerous forms, as described below. Its purpose is to help you:

• Assess how well your community-based initiative is working
• Gather feedback, data, and information about your initiative and its activities that you can share with funders and members of your community
• Define success for your community

Why is evaluation important?

In addition to helping you determine how effective your work is, evaluation can provide these advantages:

• Assists in securing money and in-kind resources for the initiative
• Garners community support for and involvement in the initiative
• Generates ideas about how the initiative can be more effective
• Helps to overcome resistance to the initiative

How can success be measured?

These are some of the ways you can evaluate your effort-i.e., gather information and measure your success:

• Telephone survey - an opportunity to poll community opinion regarding various issues related to your initiative (such as teen pregnancy).
• Survey of goals -- a paper-pencil survey distributed to community members by mail that asks them to rate the importance and feasibility of your community-based initiative's goals.
• Mapping -- an assessment ("map") that describes dimensions important to your initiative. (For example, in a project to reduce teen pregnancy, "contraceptive mapping" would note the availability and accessibility of contraceptives in the area, including types, brand, cost, location, and other qualitative challenges to use by youth.)
• Survey of satisfaction -- a paper-pencil survey distributed to members of the initiative that asks them to rate their satisfaction with issues such as the leadership, community involvement, and planning of your community-based initiative.
• Behavior survey(s) -- a paper-pencil survey distributed annually to your target population to assess their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in relation to your goal. (In the teen pregnancy example, teens would be surveyed.)
• Interviews with key participants -- semi-structured interviews that clarify important events in the life of the initiative and illustrate the value that the initiative has added to the community.
• Survey of outcomes -- a paper-pencil survey that asks initiative members, funders, and outside experts to comment on and rate the significance of changes made in the community
• Goal attainment reports -- reports that identify progress toward proposed changes identified in the action plan.
• On-line documentation system -- an Internet-based system that gathers information regarding the daily activities of the initiative, including community actions, community changes, and services provided.
• Community-level indicators -- information relevant to your initiative that is collected from local, state- or regional-level sources. (In the effort to reduce teen pregnancy, indicators on the health and well being of adolescents in your community would include estimated pregnancy rates and the number of teen males fathering a child.)
  

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