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The Evaluation Process

For the past few weeks Nexus Community Partners staff has been immersed in evaluation work in partnership with a number of our grantees and our consultant Copeland Carson and Associates.

The process itself has been formative for Nexus staff and a few key thoughts has emerged for me regarding the role and function of evaluation.

 

It seems as if too often evaluation ends up simply being about the validation of a particular program. Does it work or doesn’t work? In our meetings it was insightful to hear from organizations that see their evaluation as being about more than just measuring effectiveness, but as a method and tool to display the values that drives the work of the organization. Success is measured first by the organization, which then helps to inform the broader community. This lead me to think that if fully embraced as a philosophy and practice by an organization, evaluation can be a very valuable method of helping organizations learn about themselves as well as how they relate and/or are perceived by the broader community around them.  This then helps shift evaluation into a practice and not just a function within an organization.

Yet we know that developing this culture of evaluation can be quite a shift given the daily demands of an organization’s work. And as with any cultural shift, the implementation of this work is the harder and more challenging task.   As Nexus has learned for itself and from what our grantee partners have shared with us, implementation needs to be done slowly but intentionally so that organizations can simultaneously learn from the process while engaging in the hard work of shifting the culture of evaluation within their organization.

In the next month, Nexus hopes to emerge with a set of key evaluation questions that will inform how we collect data and demonstrate community outcomes. We also plan to create a database that will collect this information. In our work of building the field of Community Engagement, we hope to develop a survey with our grantee partners to capture what and how community residents feel about their neighborhoods and quality of life.  Lastly, Nexus will continue to build organizational capacity of our grantee partners around the value and practice of evaluation.

As an interesting resource check out six common myths of evaluation here.

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