You are the proud creator of a beautiful but lengthy project evaluation report. Now what? How can you maximize the impact of your evaluation findings? With whom should you share your results? Are there ways to communicate evaluation results beyond a traditional full-length report?

In his seminal text Utilization-focused evaluation (1978/1996), Michael Quinn Patton writes that evaluators should adopt an "active-reactive-adaptive" approach to evaluation and results dissemination (p. 284). Rather than a culminating, end-point activity, Patton sees evaluation as a catalyst for future action. Evaluation findings, when widely and diversely disseminated, can invite support and feedback, which can enable projects to adapt, improve programming and increase impact. Evaluation results that are well documented and disseminated can sensitize key stakeholders, including project beneficiaries, to the positive changes or impacts that have resulted from a given project. If the evaluation is well done, results should also pinpoint where projects have fallen short and make recommendations to address those shortcomings.

This course aims to provide participants with the tools to maximize evaluation and assessment results through various and varied forms of reporting. The course modules aim to be concise and practical while remaining theoretically grounded.

Learning Outcomes

In this course, you’ll learn:

• How to format and evaluate a standard project evaluation report
• How to identify various stakeholder audiences for project evaluation results
• How to create a plan for disseminating project evaluation results to different stakeholders
• How to utilize evaluation results beyond external dissemination