Program Evaluation: Planning on the Front End Spares Pain in the Back End

I'm working on an upcoming series of posts that borrow heavily from our grant writing seminar. In the meantime, I'm going to put the cart before the horse a bit and post about Program Evaluation.

In Tennessee, where we are located, the state fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 and we will soon be deeply immersed in analyzing program evaluation data and formulating annual reports. Many grant writers aren't involved in the evaluation process, while others are heavily involved and even serve as the third party project evaluator of record. Regardless, all organizations that receive grant funding have a vested interest in making sure their grant writer takes program evaluation into account on the front end, while developing the proposal, so as to spare whomever will be evaluating the project "pain in the back end."

Identifying outcome measures, or at least indicating some way of measuring the impact of the project, has become almost universal in grant proposals. The little known secret is that most funders really will want a progress report that indicates your project's success in meeting the specific goals and objectives identified in the grant proposal.

If you are working with a grant writer worth their salt, they will be cognizant of this fact on the front end and will not identify measures in the proposal that are, in reality*, impossible to measure. Secondly, whomever will ultimately be responsible for collecting the data will have a thorough understanding of the evaluation measures and will, in reality*, collect the appropriate data relative to the measures identified in the proposal.

As long as the project was relatively well thought out and has been implemented with a reasonable degree of fidelity and appropriate data are collected, program evaluation and reporting is a pretty simple and painless process**.

* In a perfect world, these things would be "no brainers" and would of course happen every trip of the train, but the grant world is never a perfect world. Too often at least one if not both of these crucial items fail to materialize. I personally will not write an immeasurable goal or objective into a grant, but I have evaluated enough grant programs written by other grant writers to know that this happens way too often. I've also worked with enough do-gooders to know that it often takes a threat of job loss, if not bodily harm, to convince an activist to do their paperwork (collect data).

** Due to the aforementioned fatal flaws resulting from the disconnect between the perfect world and the world of grants, evaluation is almost always a pain in the back end. Measuring the immeasurable is impossible and reconstructing data after the fact is nearly as difficult. And, the worst part is that the evaluation must be done or you run the risk of jeopardizing current and future funding. Yes, the funder can and will take the money back if you fail to meet your reporting obligations and once you fail to meet obligations associated with a grant, you can be blacklisted from receiving future funding, from anyone not just the agency you failed to satisfy.