Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Why Evaluate?

Because there are a lot of good reasons for program evaluation and different types of decisions you might be trying to make, it’s important to identify the primary purpose for each and every evaluation project. This can help keep you focused and keep the evaluation manageable. The primary purpose will probably be different each time.

Generally, the main purposes for evaluation are:

• assessing needs and planning effective programs
• monitoring program implementation and progress to ensure efficiency and effectiveness
• assessing program results, measuring success and improving program services and operations

Evaluation is not just something you do because you think you have to. It can provide your agency with invaluable and quantitative information about what is working well. You can then share that information with learners, volunteers, funders and the general public.

Evaluation can provide significant benefits for your agency. It can help you:

• understand, verify or increase the impact of your services
• improve delivery mechanisms to be more efficient and less costly
• identify strengths and weaknesses
• clarify the mission
• stimulate staff and board thinking about programming goals, how goals can be met and how to know if they are being met
• communicate powerful results for public relations and promotion – including recruiting both students and volunteers, and for fundraising
• produce important data to use for proposal writing and/or to give to funders
• produce valid data for comparisons between programming activities in your agency to help make decisions about continuing or discontinuing those activities
• identify staff and volunteer training needs
• identify and help attract potential partnerships
• identify and support innovation and best practices

It’s also important to remember that every evaluation doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. You can do a thorough and complete organizational evaluation, but you can also evaluate just one component of your agency. For example, you could evaluate the effectiveness of your resource library or you could evaluate the impact brought about by incorporating small group instruction with Level 2 students. Human nature being what it is, we often turn a simple task into a complex one, so try to remember to keep it simple.

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