April 19, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
Level Best: How Small and Grassroots Nonprofits Can Tackle Evaluation and Talk Results
by Marcia Festen and Marianne Philbin
“Evaluation should not be considered an ‘add on’ or an occasional special project,” write Marcia Festen and Marianne Philbin. “Solid evaluation is the first step toward increasing organizational effectiveness and, in turn, successfully marketing and documenting your work.”
Ms. Festen and Ms. Philbin, both nonprofit consultants, offer a guide for charity and foundation staff members, consultants, board members, and other volunteer leaders, to help them evaluate programs, fund raising, and organizational structure.
The book focuses on five stages of evaluation and includes worksheets and samples to illustrate each one.
The first stage is planning and involves orienting staff and board members, determining a time frame and a budget for the evaluation, discussing what areas it will investigate, and other preliminary steps.
The second stage is to decide what questions are useful, such as “Why do people participate or drop out of the programs? How many hours are participants involved?” The authors also explain the difference between outcomes-oriented evaluations — a look at a program’s results — and process-oriented evaluations, which study how the program itself was conducted.
The third stage involves collecting the data, and the authors discuss the merits of different approaches, such as questionnaires and focus groups.
In the fourth stage, the data are interpreted and conclusions drawn, while the last stage encompasses using the evaluation results to discover strengths and weaknesses, share the charity’s mission with others, and plan for the future.
Resources include a glossary of useful terms, sample meeting agendas, a sample outline of an evaluation report, and other materials.
“If you do not evaluate your programs yourself, you can bet that opinions will be formed about your work anyway,” the authors write. “Evaluation offers the chance to replace impressions with facts.”
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103; (800) 956-7739; fax (317) 572-4002; http://www.josseybass.com; 136 pages; $24.95; ISBN 0-7879-7906-6.
