Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Evaluation

What Does It All Mean?

Evaluation is Step 2 of the strategic planning process. In this step, you will answer the question: what does the information mean?

Essentially, this step helps you make conclusions based on the information you gathered during the assessment phase. Although you won't have begun an evaluation of the assessment data yet, you will probably have a good handle on the particular strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing your agency. During the evaluation you will bring your professional judgment to bear on the assessment data and identify:

1. The degree to which the various internal strengths and weaknesses affect the success of your agency.
2. The significance of the external opportunities and threats facing your agency and its continued success in the future

Evaluating your data will support the decision-making process that comes next by identifying those areas that require urgent attention and those areas that can be left as is. Evaluation will also identify opportunities that are just too good to pass up, and it will highlight red flags which indicate that now is not a good time to move forward.

For example, the assessment results might reveal that the agency has no marketing strategy and, in fact, does very little in the way of outreach in the community. If the agency has been struggling to meet contact hours, then you might decide this finding has a serious impact on success. You might determine to make marketing a priority for the near future. If, on the other hand, there is a constant stream of inquiries and a waiting list for the program, then you may not consider the lack of a marketing strategy as a significant finding.

You may, however, want to instead look deeper into this situation for other significant issues. For example: Why is there a waiting list? Is it an unusual year? Has there always been a lack of learners but suddenly that has changed? Has there been a change in the employment rates? Is a new business coming to town that people are training for?

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Next steps in evaluation

In order to evaluate the assessment data, you will need two things:

• A document that summarizes all the data from the assessment phase
• A scale or tool by which you can measure or assign a value to the findings (i.e. rank the findings according to each item's status or need for attention to ensure ongoing success.) This tool is included in the next section.

The evaluation activity itself involves:

• Reviewing the items from the assessment phase
• Making a judgment call on the need for attention for each item
• Marking each item according to its status as thriving, safe, stable, at risk, or in crisis

Although this could be a collaborative activity, probably the most time-and-energy efficient way is to carry out an evaluation activity yourself first and then present the results to key stakeholders for discussion, revision and final validation. It is crucial to get the support and general agreement of stakeholders at this stage before moving on to decision-making.

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