7. Evaluation

Evaluating your program is a continual but necessary process in order to establish your prevention’s success; it is one of the most important things you will do. There are a variety of ways to evaluate in your prevention program: its community level outcomes, its effectiveness in meeting goals (its methodology), and its effectiveness in promoting awareness. Community level outcomes, such as percent decrease in underage tobacco sales, are probably the most important things to evaluate in terms of promoting awareness and obtaining funding. Obviously, a more successful program will have an easier time at both. Incorporate community members into your evaluation. They can tell you directly what works and what does not. In addition, using community members in evaluation promotes awareness of your program and indirectly makes it look more professional because you are actively trying to improve performance. Evaluating your program’s effectiveness in meeting goals indirectly evaluates community level outcomes. It also makes your program look more successful in the public’s eye if you are able to say, “Our program hoped to accomplish this, and we have.” If you find that halfway into the program, none of your short- or medium-term goals have been met, you need to reevaluate your methodology and change something for the better. Evaluating awareness promotion allows you to decide what media channels are working and what media channels are ineffective. The evaluation process does not have to include only yourprogram. Do extensive literature searches to find out what has worked previously and in what circumstances. Analyzing the literature will show you both effective and ineffective means of evaluation, and it will provide rigorously tested evaluation toolsthat you may employ for evaluating your program. Build on others past experience and use their evaluation plans as your blueprints. Just remember that every situation is different and you must decide whether or not what worked for another program’s situations will likewise be effective in your particular situation. Once you have the results of your evaluations, they mean nothing unless you incorporate them into making your prevention more effective. Send the results of your evaluation to community members and local leaders, asking them for suggestions for ways to improve program performance. You must constantly evaluate your program and incorporate you evaluation findings into your intervention to maximize its success.

Skill Areas:
A Ability toengage community members in ongoing evaluation activities

B Ability to engage community members and local leaders in using evaluation findings to make program-related decisions

C Ability to evaluate programs in terms of community-level outcomes

D Ability to evaluate programs in terms of the processes used to achieve goals and objectives

E Ability to evaluate program designs by utilizing existing research to learn what works and under what circumstances

F Ability to use data generated through evaluation activities to improve program performance