Freelance Writing and Research

Evaluations

If you decide to take up research as part of your lifestyle and you do it on a contract basis then you will inevitably come up against evaluations. These are often a built in requirement of both voluntary community projects that rely on private funders and some Government funded projects. Ideally this evaluation should be ongoing throughout the life of the project and clever project managers build this into their funding bids.

If you get brought in at the end of the project and are required to do an overall evaluation and produce a report then you could find yourself with a can of worms if the monitoring and evaluation that was supposed to take place during the life of the project has either not been done or been done badly.

Evaluation reports are often different to other research reports because evaluations are usually measured by outcomes and the outcomes are seen to be achieved when a certain number of indicators have been fulfilled. If, for example, you were evaluating a project and looking at good practice then there should be an outcome delineating that, e.g. inter-agency working, which might be measured by whether people attend meetings, how well they share information and whether they can work together to solve a problem - thse are the indicators. If the indicators are met then in the project's terms it has achieved its own vision of good practice.

Your job as an evaluator is to take what is known as an outcomes approach, ultimately the indicators and outcomes should reflect the project's original aims. So if you had a project involving a children's charity for example then one of your aims could well be that there is an integrated approach to meeting children's needs - one way of assessing whether this aim has been met is to look at indicators of good interagency working practice. Hope all this makes sense if you are working on an evaluation and finding it tough, then leave a comment or use the contact form and I will get back to you.