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PROGRAM EVALUATION GUIDE
Determining Evaluation Costs
Potential Out-of-Pocket and Internal Costs
PERSONNEL/HOURS
- Meetings/staff time to determine:
a) the purpose and approach of the evaluation (this may be a series of meetings involving many people from the organization)
b) who will provide research services
c) methods for monitoring current delivery of services
d) training methods
e) where to find resources for conducting the study
f) how to keep in contact with researchers
- Recruitment efforts for volunteers, research evaluators, students, etc.
- Consultants or outside evaluator costs (if applicable)
- Collecting the data (this is probably the most significant cost, although we have suggestions for how to reduce these costs)
- Inputting the data
- Interpreting the data
- Determining implications of the data for current program (this will probably involve some pre-digesting of the data, followed by organization-wide discussions about the findings and the implications of these findings)
FACILITIES
- Will additional office space be required for conducting in person, telephone interviews or will this be done by volunteers, by another partner program, by an outside vendor?
- Will additional phones/phone lines be required? If you are surveying by phone are the calls going to be local or long distance?
- Will any computers or software need to be purchased to analyze the data (like Excel or SPSS or Stata)?
OTHER COSTS
- Training materials
- General telephone use
- Any considerable photocopying costs
- Any printing costs
- Travel (if sites are widely dispersed) or if an outside evaluator will need to travel to your sites
The above section has been adapted from Royse, David and Thyer, Bruce A. (1996). Program Evaluation: An
Introduction, Third Edition. Chicago: Nelson Hall.
Strategies for Reducing Costs
Finding Partners. A logical way to overcome resource constraints, and one strongly consistent with the idea of social capital, is to form partnerships with other organizations wishing to conduct similar evaluations. A community funder or some other umbrella organization might convene a working group of such partners and perhaps also provide some technical or financial support for the project. The consortium can meet to discuss the social capital concept and how it relates to each organization's program offerings, to share research plans and survey questionnaires, and to discuss results.
Using and Sharing Volunteers. Staffing the interviews and collecting the evaluation data is likely to be the largest single cash cost of the evaluation. One way to reduce this cost is to use volunteer interviewers. In order to ensure high quality, unbiased results, the interviewers will require some training and should not be involved in day-to-day program operations (see Step 5 for more info). [One possibility is for partners with whom you are already cooperating to provide volunteer interviewers for each others' programs.]
Collaborating with local colleges and universities: Developing this evaluation as a research project for graduate students in social work or some other social science could also provide a useful field research project for the students and provide rigorous researchers for the organization doing the evaluation at low or zero cost. Finally, it might also provide a later pool of volunteers on which to draw.
Return to Step One
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This guide was created by
Thomas Sander, Executive Director of the Saguaro Seminar, &
Stephen Minicucci, Ph.D.,
Principal Investigator
Edited and adapted for the web by Benjamin Toff
E-mail us your ideas for improving this Guide.
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