Evaluation is work that exists alongside program planning and implementation. Ongoing formative evaluation allows project leaders and staff to gain an accurate picture of what is taking place during a program, make mid-course corrections, and ensure that program goals are being met. Evaluation, as a formative ongoing dimension of an organization's work, is primarily about learning. As a means of learning, evaluation builds the reflective practices of an organization, the habits of mind that keep leaders and staff alert to the dynamic range of factors that contribute to a program's strengths and weaknesses. An evaluation is guided by a set of questions, focused around the goals and hoped-for results of a program, and it provides a set of answers to those questions by identifying the significant and important factors that contribute to how the program impacts its participants as well as the community and sponsoring organization.
Evaluation also serves as a means of drawing stakeholders into an organization.
The project director and staff, board members, constituents and their communities, the larger community of practitioners engaged in similar kinds of work, and, finally, funders and benefactors. All these stakeholders care that what happens in an organization and its programs makes a real difference in the lives of the people served. An evaluation helps leaders build a solid case for their work, a case based on accurate and reliable information that demonstrates a range of results and various kinds of impact that the work has produced. It also shows how the organization learns, adapts, and thinks. Evaluations can build program support when the questions and concerns of stakeholders have been clearly defined and the questions these audiences care about guide the evaluation.