5 Steps to an Evaluation
Step 1: Do a Community Assessment
The first step in designing your evaluation is a community assessment. A community assessment helps you determine the health information needs of the community, the community resources that would support your project, and information to guide you in your choice and design of outreach strategies. The community assessment phase is completed in three segments:
- Get organized
- Gather information
- Assemble, interpret, and act on your findings
Get Organized
- This phase includes outreach, background research, networking, reflecting on the evaluation and program goals, and formulating evaluation questions.
- Conduct a stakeholder analysis to identify individuals or groups who are particularly proactive or involved in the community. Find out why they are involved, what is going well in their community, and what they would like to see improved.
- Network and identify a team of advisors
- Conduct a literature review
- Use the Positive Deviance (PD) approach to identify early adopters. More information on Positive Deviance
- Take an inventory of what you already know and what you don’t know. More information on SWOT Analysis
- Develop community assessment questions
Gather Information
- This phase includes gathering data from different external and internal sources to inform the development of your program and evaluation plan.
- Collect data about the community
- Secondary sources (some suggestions)
- Primary sources (interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observations, site visits, online discussions)
Assemble, Interpret, and Act on your findings
- This phase includes processing the information gathered into understandable takeaways that can be used for the program and the evaluation.
- Interpret findings and make project decisions
