December 11, 2003 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Manager’s Guide to Program Evaluation: Planning, Contracting, and Managing for Useful Results
by Paul W. Mattessich
This book outlines how a charity can benefit from appraising its programs, and gives advice on designing and carrying out such evaluations and reporting the results.
Paul W. Mattessich, executive director of the Wilder Research Center, an organization in St. Paul that conducts applied social research, writes that evaluations can help nonprofit groups improve their programs, assess the needs of clients, and decide how to allocate money to projects.
He discusses the stages of an evaluation and offers advice for identifying what information should be collected, including demographic data on the people the nonprofit group serves and public perceptions of the organization. After gathering and analyzing the information, Mr. Mattessich says, the organization should present the results to potential donors, collaborators, employees, and volunteers. To make the presentation as credible as possible, he advises that the group make sure it has enough participants in its study and that it show comparisons with other organizations.
The book also describes what to look for when hiring a consultant or full-time employee to carry out evaluations, and offers advice on dividing tasks between the nonprofit director and the evaluator.
Publisher: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, 919 Lafond Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. 55104-2108; (651) 659-6024 or (800) 274-6024; fax (651) 642-2061; books@wilder.org; http://www.wilder.org; 112 pages; $25; I.S.B.N. 0-940069-38-5.
