Evaluation Utilization – 1.01 Internal and External Feedback
Now is a good time to review the initial stakeholder map created during the planning phase. In light of the results of the evaluation, consider whether the stakeholders you identified previously would be interested in any aspect of your findings.
By their nature, internal and external stakeholders are likely to have different interests in a given program. Even among the internal or external groups there can be a lot of diversity of interests or connections to the program. Internal stakeholders might include participants themselves, facilitators or volunteers involved with the program, organization leaders who are close to the program or who are in the process of making decisions about new funding or about the best use of staff and other resources. External stakeholder often include funders, but may also be connected to the program in other ways – as collaborators (or perhaps even competitors), groups with ties to the community or region affected by the program, decision-makers other than funders, community members, voters, and so on. The high-priority internal and external interests and needs might have provided one or more of the priorities for your evaluation. If so, then your evaluation planning has probably anticipated what kinds of information, results, and interpretations you intend to share with these priority stakeholders. Feedback could take many forms: formal written reports, structured group presentations, more informal or brief summaries, or discussions in staff meetings or public meetings, and so on.
Stay alert, also, for side-discoveries or surprises that emerged in the course of the evaluation that might be of interest to these or to other internal or external stakeholders. For example, even if funder priorities led you to focus the evaluation on specific program outcomes, you might have had responses to open-ended survey questions or responses in interviews that brought to light an unanticipated benefit of the program. The funders should be informed of this, of course, but this “news” would also be of interest to staff who have worked hard on the program, or volunteers who have given time and energy to the work, or the marketing department that will obtain a new way of promoting the organization. External audiences might also be relevant to some of these unanticipated findings. Moreover although negative results can be difficult to report on, it is important to keep in mind the ultimate goals of the program. If seemingly negative results lead to a redirection of effort in more productive directions, that truly is a good thing.
Whatever the nature of your results, be sure to tailor your feedback to the specific audience to which you will be presenting it. Internal audiences could be presumed to already know enough about the program, but this might not always be the case. So even for internal reports be mindful of program-specific jargon, and be attentive to the background level of knowledge that people are likely to have. This is even more true for external audiences. Succinct feedback that covers what people actually need to know in order to make their own assessments and interpretations are essential.