For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is number 13 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy. As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!
The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved. Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step. Here is more on Step 11. As there is a holiday for Christmas the final two installments in this series will be posted on January 3rd and January 10th.
Step 11
Developing and presenting a written evaluation report gives an opportunity for others such as funding agencies, officials, researchers and other staff to learn from the evaluation. Before you decide to write a report, think about how you communicate in your organisations. Match your reporting style with this you may not need a written report!
Here is an outline for the type of information that is usually included in a written evaluation report. This may be too long a document for your purpose. Adapt it to match our needs.
A Sample Outline of an Evaluation Report
1. Title page
- Name of report;
- Name and address of the project;
- Time period covered by the project evaluation;
- The date the report was completed; and
- The name of the authors of the report.
2. Summary
This is really important as many people will only red the summary! It is easier to write the summary AFTER the rest of the report has been finished. It usually contains
- The purpose of the evaluation;
- A very brief description of the project (3-4 sentences);
- Who carried out the evaluation and how it was done;
- Important results;
- Important conclusions; and
- All the recommendations.
3. Table of contents
4. Description of the project (history, aims, objectives, target group)
5. Description of the evaluation process and methods
6. Results
7. Conclusions and recommendations
8. Appendices:
- A list of people involved in the evaluation e.g. officials and young people (if this is appropriate to identify them);
- Examples of the tools and recording methods/charts you used;
- Examples of tables and diagrams; and
- Lists of other documents and references used.
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