Writing Your Proposal Evaluation

Evaluations measure change or progress between conditions before you carried out your project and conditions after you carried out your project. Decide how much change is necessary to make your project a success. You will need to develop indicators: bench marks or standards by which to measure the success or failure of each objective in your proposal.

In the evaluation, you reaffirm the importance of your objectives and their connection to the values of the grantor.

Ask yourself these questions when you conduct an evaluation:

• Am I answering the questions that are important to my stakeholders?
• Am I choosing the right design (procedures and methods) for my evaluation?
• Should I evaluate during the project, or after?
• Did I get the information I need to complete an evaluation?
• Are my results clear and understandable?

To plan your evaluation:

• Identify what you are going to evaluate. Progress or Impact?
• Decide the methods you will use for evaluation. Quantitative, Qualitative, or Mixed?
• Summarize and report your findings.

Pick a design that will best answer the questions your grantor will want to know about:

Formative: tests the project while it is still going on and can be changed in mid-course. The cook tastes the soup while it is cooking.

Summative: measures the effects of the project after it is finished. The dinner guests give their opinion to the cook after eating the soup.

Show an example of your evaluation instrument (questionnaire, experiment, face to face or telephone interviews, etc. in your report.

Include at least one example of typical evaluation data (how the results of your tests for effectiveness will look).

Include a budget of your evaluation (postage, phone, FAX, travel, paper, special computer programs, etc.).

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