Rather than evaluation being done to you by an outside evaluator, continuous evaluation is something you and your partners do for yourselves so that you understand what you are doing and accomplishing. Taking charge of your own continuous evaluation process builds capacity within collaborating organizations for analyzing information and improving decision-making. 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.