When Not to Evaluate

These are probably the last words you expected to hear from a professional evaluator.  But there’s a common misconception that you should aspire to evaluate everything, all of the time.

No. Evaluation is not an ‘all of the time’ kind of activity. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an essential tool to inform your work. At its best, evaluation delivers insight that is actionable and can become your BFF.

All too often we come across a backlog (you know…the piles of forms causing a fire hazard in your home office or knot of disorderly, unloved digital files you’re pretending don’t exist) of ‘evaluation’ forms issued to every poor teacher who crosses the threshold with their class – and they all pretty much say the same thing. Or standard feedback forms thrust onto every event-goers mitt, that all come back saying everything was ‘great’.

Whilst this information can be useful when a programme is new to help ensure quality and for fine-tuning delivery, it soon becomes repetitive.  This data outlives its usefulness because it stops telling you anything new.  This is when we often forget to revisit, and change-up our evaluation tools and lines of enquiry.

Look away if you’re of a sensitive disposition…you’re probably wasting your time collecting it, stop.

So what should we be doing instead? Using your valuable time (and that of the people we gather data from) and resources to apply evaluation as intended – as a ‘spot check’ on what’s happening, and a tool to help you delve into how something is working (or not) and why.

This is one of the fundamentals we explore during our 6-week Evaluation Bootcamp. For more on this, and other game-changing first principles of planning, undertaking and reporting on project and event evaluation. Or for more hands-on help, book a ‘heath check’ review of your current evaluative practice to get practical recommendations.

Kate Measures, Technical Lead for Research and Evaluation