Crafting Useful Evaluation Reports
Sarah M. Dunifon
A group of professionals listen to a presentation
Welcome back to our Insights! This is the third installment in our series exploring evaluation topics of interest to our newsletter subscribers. We previously reviewed building a culture of evaluation and choosing evaluation instruments. In this edition, Dr. Sarah Dunifon will dive into the process of creating useful evaluation reports. Let’s get into it.
How you approach crafting evaluation reports is key to making your evaluation insights useful. We all know the trope of the thick evaluation report that gets dusty just sitting on the shelf. That is not the outcome we aim for at Improved Insights. We employ a utilization-focused approach to ensure your findings and insights can effectively inform your practice, be shared with others, and help you demonstrate the impact of your work.
We’ve written before about the structural aspects of report crafting, like designing evaluation deliverables and the essential parts of an evaluation report. But, how do you ensure that your evaluation reports are actually useful? The key, as with so many things, is to start with your “why.” Why are you conducting the evaluation? Is it to explore what is working within your programs, and what is not? Is it to have data to show a funder to solicit more support? Is it to demonstrate to your board or your visitors that your programs have an impact? Starting with your “why” is an important step in designing a functional and useful evaluation report. Clearly identifying your goals, whether it’s one or multiple, will help you select the appropriate deliverables.
Hand-in-hand with identifying your goals is identifying your audience for the evaluation deliverables. Your audience might include your education department, funder, your whole organization, program participants, board of directors, community, others, or some combination of these. Once you know who you are designing for, you will also want to identify their needs. For example, maybe you plan to present your work at a professional conference or in a journal. In this case, it would be necessary to provide more of the methodological details of your study than you would if you were sharing top findings with, say, other departments at your institution.
Once you’ve identified your goals and your audience, you can move on to choosing the best formatting for your deliverables. For example, if I aim to demonstrate my department’s overall impact to the rest of the organization, I might decide to move forward with an Executive Summary or a visual Impact Report. Often, organizational audiences outside the education sphere are seeking high-level insights and easily digestible information. But, if your audience is other education staff members focused on program improvement, producing a full report or workshop that ends with actionable recommendations may be more useful.
Once you’ve identified the goals, audiences, and type(s) of deliverables that are most appropriate to your needs, you will next need to determine what information to share and how to share it. Choosing what to share (e.g., the purpose of the study, methods, findings, next steps, etc.) depends on your audience and goals. It may be appropriate to go super in-depth, or just stick to the highlights. Deciding how to communicate the information is also dependent on these factors. For instance, you may want to employ many data visualizations to show data trends at a glance. Check out our Insights for features on how to visually present “parts of a whole” data or ordinal data trends. You may also want to incorporate design elements, like using color strategically. Or, maybe a simple written report does the trick, in which case you can reference our article on essential parts of an evaluation report.
Regardless of the variables we’ve discussed, remember to focus on your specific needs and how your report or deliverable will meet them. And remember, the work doesn’t end with the report! Consider if a presentation, workshop, or interactive activity might be suitable to turn your insights into action.
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