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Tips for Determining your Evaluation Model~ Have a meaningful discussion with your funder or funders. Try to come to a mutual understanding about what should be evaluated to improve your advocacy efforts and move toward long-term results. Decide together the amount of resources that should be allocated to evaluation. This is much easier than playing a "guessing game" about how many resources to allocate toward evaluation and what to evaluate. ~ As a rule of thumb, your budget for evaluation should be approximately 5-10 percent of the total advocacy campaign budget. ~ Be creative: Save by doubling up. Think of ways that advocacy activities can double as qualitative or quantitative indicators for assessing progress toward benchmarks. For example, recording a public hearing for the campaign Web site can serve as a qualitative indicator of congressional attitudes toward an issue -- and this data can be collected by an advocacy practitioner. ~ Lack of planning for evaluation can cause stress for staff members if roles, responsibility and time allocations are not determined at the start of the advocacy efforts. Failure to plan for evaluation and adding it on as an extra task in a proposal will only create additional work for staff and will be of little value for you or a funder. ~ When dealing with limited resources, think carefully about what to evaluate. Remember, evaluation can be very time consuming; dedicate the time to monitoring and evaluating those aspects of the campaign that will be most useful in shaping and directing it. |
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