In 2004, Marsheida Dorsey-Carn was murdered by her 18-year-old boyfriend. After serving almost 12 years in prison, that same man murdered a second victim, LaPorscha Baldwin, in a fatal act of domestic violence. Through this horrendous tragedy, we came to learn about the impactful work of Dr. Purposed Carn (Marsheida’s step-mother) as well as the...

I’m writing this at the time when the “New Year, New Me” wind is starting to circulate. The shame of “holiday eating”, the sugar demon, and jokes about elastic waists begin to build their momentum for the year. There will be sign up for bootcamps, restrictive diets, detoxes, and teas that make you sprint to...

The first Tuesday of every April is the Sexual Assault Awareness Month Day of Action.

When disaster strikes, it tears the curtain away from the festering problems that we have beneath them. – Barack Obama So why are we even talking about evaluation during a crisis or disaster? Crisis, by definition, is an unpredictable period of immense struggle, threat, and difficulty. As we grapple with disasters, those of us who...

Rape crisis centers, other sexual violence service providers, and community-based organizations often struggle to maintain adequate resources to serve their communities. When this is the case, it can feel difficult to earmark money for evaluation. However, evaluation is a critical and integral part of accountability and provision of effective, high quality services. Additionally, it’s still...

Colleges and universities can be great resources for agencies that need assistance with developing evaluation processes for their work. Depending on your budget and the scope of your evaluation, you might want to look at hiring an external evaluator that might be a professor or graduate student for assistance. Also, it’s not unusual for students...

What does it take to do good evaluation? When you read the question above, do you immediately think about data analysis skills?  Or survey design skills? While an evaluator needs skills in data collection and analysis, these are only two of the many areas of knowledge and skill that help an evaluator succeed.  An organization’s...

Comprehensive primary prevention work requires that we work beyond the individual and relationship levels in order to create deep and meaningful change in our communities. The prospect of evaluating beyond the individual and relationship levels of our work can seem daunting. However, although the potential scope of data collection is larger for community-level initiatives, the...

Evaluation design answers an important set of questions about how the evaluation will roll out, specifically it answers particular questions related to data collection: What is the context of your evaluation? When will you collect it? From whom? How? What is the context? Before planning for data collection, analysis and use, you should answer some...

Outcomes are often a critical part of program development and evaluation. There are evaluation models that don’t require pre-determined outcomes (goal-free evaluation, for example) and innovative program development models often do not involve pre-establishing specific outcomes and rather look for emergent outcomes. However, most of us will be involved in developing and implementing programs and...