This guide book offers suggestions for how good information can help strengthen emerging comprehensive strategies and also can document impacts on children, families, and communities. Because comprehensive strategies will be unique to their communities, we do not provide specific prescriptions for how partners in comprehensive strategies should engage in evaluation. Instead, we offer a menu of possibilities from which to choose as you incorporate results-focused information into your local strategy. Good evaluations can be as diverse and multifaceted as the strategies that they assess. A good evaluation approach meets the unique information needs of partners and stakeholders in the community in which it is used.
Good evaluations can be as diverse and multifaceted as the strategies that they assess.
This guide book contains four additional chapters, plus a Tool Kit. Chapter 2 presents a framework for continuous evaluation, highlighting cross-cutting evaluation principles and the various stages of planning and conducting a good evaluation. Chapters 3 and 4 expand on these ideas, exploring the stages of the evaluation framework outlined in Chapter 2. In both chapters, we suggest questions to consider, ways to obtain information to answer them, and examples of how having good information has strengthened real-world strategies at each stage in their development. Chapter 5 describes key internal and external resources that can enrich your evaluation.