Who Should Do the Evaluation
Many partnerships have the impression that evaluation has to be carried out by external evaluators and will be expensive in both time and money to conduct. However, many very good evaluations have been conducted by practitioners working on their own projects (for example the previous winners and shortlist of the Tilley Awards). The key to good newsletters, making presentations at conferences or workshops, or through informal networking is not who did the work, but whether the evaluation method meets the following criteria:
- Is clearly and fully shown (transparent).
- Measured what it claimed to measure (valid).
- Conclusions made only from the data presented (independent).
- Others doing the evaluation would have produced the same results (replicable).
When using internal staff resources to evaluate the projects or programmes, the partnership will want to ensure that there is sufficient time built in to the project for the staff to be able to complete the work. When staff members are under pressure to deliver pieces of work, it is often the evaluation that receives less attention, often resulting in a poor or undelivered evaluation. External evaluators can be drawn from partnership organisations, specialist research or evaluation companies or freelance consultants. The Social Research Association has produced some useful guidance on contracting researchers which can be applied to obtaining external evaluators.
Whoever does the evaluation, it is important that those commissioning it (often the strategy group) understand the purpose of evaluation and are able to construct clear and simple terms of reference for any evaluation undertaken.
