Tips for Best Results

The following are tips taken from various sources for ways to most effectively communicate your evaluation findings.

1. Keep your report(s) accurate, balanced, and fair.
    
2. Engage your reader. The final report must engage the reader and stimulate attention and interest. Descriptive narrative, anecdotes, personalized observations, and vignettes make for livelier reading than a long recitation of statistical measures and indicators.¹
    
3. Keep it concise and readable.
    
4. Keep it elementary. In summarizing findings, the evaluators should not be afraid of appearing too elementary. Those who want more statistical or other detail can find it in the back-up technical report.²
    
5. Make sure your findings aren’t ignored. Make sure you:³
    
   
   • Give your information to the right people!
   • Address issues which those people think are important
   • Be sure the information is presented in time to be useful and in a way that's clearly understood
    
6. Start early. Although we usually think about report writing as the final step in the evaluation, a good deal of the work can (and often does) take place before the data are collected. Because of the volume of written data that are collected on site, it is generally a good idea to organize study notes as soon after a site visit or interview as possible. These notes will often serve as a starting point for any individual case studies that might be included in the report.
    
7. Make the report concise and readable. Because of the volume of material that is generally collected during mixed method evaluations, a challenging aspect of reporting is deciding what information might be omitted from the final report. As a rule, only a fraction of the tabulations prepared for survey analysis need to be displayed and discussed. One method for limiting the volume of information is to include only narrative that is tied to the evaluation questions. Another method is to consider the likely information needs of your audience.
    
8. Use qualitative information liberally. This will enhance the overall tone of the report. In particular, lively quotes can highlight key points and break up the tedium of a technical summation of study findings. In addition, graphic displays and tables can be used to summarize significant trends that were uncovered during observations or interviews.
    
9. Solicit feedback from project staff and respondents. It is often useful to ask the project director and other staff members to review sections of the report that quote information they have contributed in interviews, focus groups, or informal conversations. This review is useful for correcting omissions and misinterpretations and may elicit new details or insights that staff members failed to share during the data collection period.¹

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1. Source: Frechtling, J., Sharp, L., & Westat, eds. (1997). Reporting the results of mixed method evaluations. In User-friendly handbook for mixed method evaluations. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, Directorate for Education and Human Resource.
 
2. Source: Muskin, L.A. (1993). Understanding evaluation: The way to better prevention programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
http://www.ed.gov/PDFDocs/handbook.pdf
 
3. Source: Hampton, C., Francisco, V.T., & Berkowitz, B. (n.d.). Communicating information to funders for support and accountability. Retrieved September 1, 2004 from the Community Tool Box web site .
 
Bibliography:
 
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2001). Ensure use of evaluation findings and share lessons learned. In Introduction to program evaluation for comprehensive tobacco control programs (pp. 71-76). Atlanta, GA: the Author. Click Here