5.
Refining
Goal:
The goal of this module is to help you determine how to best share your evaluation results, and to refine your evaluation to prepare for the next steps.
What did your evaluation results show you?
After you have completed data collection and analyzed your results, it’s important to reflect on the data you captured and determine next steps, including how you will share your results.
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As your first step, ask yourself the following questions:
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What are the key findings of your evaluation?
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What are the biggest learnings?
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What changes can or should you make because of these findings?​
Sharing your results
Sharing your results is a key element of your evaluation plan. It's a way of closing the circle to report back to those who you identified as stakeholders so your evaluation results themselves can have an impact on future practice. Before you can share your results, you need to consider what it is that you're sharing.
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Using the answers to the questions above consider:
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What is the story that your results tell?
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What do you want to highlight?
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What are the main messages?
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You'll then want to determine with whom you'd like to share the results. Refer back to your worksheet where you identified your stakeholders and consider the following for each stakeholder:
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What is the key message you want to share with them?
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How will you share this information?
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How will they use this information?
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Finally you need to determine how you want to share the results. The strategy you choose will depend on your audience. A number of methods can be used including informal conversations, written reports, summary documents, presentations, webinars, podcasts, infographics and others. You'll want to ask yourself the following questions:
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Will the language and format of your how you report your results be suitable for your audience(s)?
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Where will your information be shared?
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Use this worksheet to help you with this process.
Next Steps
Evaluation is an ongoing process. Now it's time to consider your next steps. To do this, consider the following questions:
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What else do you want to learn from this evaluation?
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How do you have to change your evaluation plans to meet these goals?
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