Evaluate Together

STEP 7: Provide feedback to the community.

When the team has finished its analysis, it is important to feed the results back to the participating communities in a way that everyone can understand. The feedback session is a chance to validate the results and to raise questions that the team and the community have about them.

In preparing for the feedback session, consider the primary purposes of the session. Is the session primarily to:

• Provide information?
• Stimulate dialogue?
• Seek community insight/answers to questions?
• Advocate for some type of action?
• Provide a mechanism for feedback from the community?
• Comply with donor or other requirements?

The primary purposes of the meeting will help the team determine how best to structure the time. Team members should discuss with their respective stakeholder groups what they want from the feedback session before the team decides what the primary purposes should be. As with any community meeting, arrange the time and place with communities well in advance so that people can arrange their schedules and also to avoid conflicts with other meetings and community events. To make best use of this time with the community, the team will need to be well-prepared. Simplify the results so that the major findings are covered. You will generally not have enough time to go into the many details that may be interesting to you but may be less important to people attending the meeting. A summary report should be available for participants who would like to learn more about the evaluation.

It is easy to adopt a one-way communication style when presenting evaluation results. There is a lot of information that the team would like to communicate to its audience, and the easiest method is to tell everyone everything in a plenary session. But this approach can be tedious, particularly if the information is organized around the answers to survey questions or other evaluation tools. There are many other creative ways to share results, ways that encourage more dialogue and learning. For example:

• Simple graphics or other visual tools can help communicate the results if presented in culturally appropriate ways. It is important to pre-test graphics if you choose to use them.
• In a gallery walk, you can post the results on a wall using pictures such as those mentioned above and have participants walk around the room. Small groups stop at each picture and describe what they see. A facilitator from the evaluation team can explain the results in more detail and can answer questions. You may put up a blank sheet next to the result so that comments and questions can be recorded.
• Distribute summary reports (in writing or in pictures) to small groups of five or six people each. A facilitator from the evaluation team can discuss the results with his/her group and ask open-ended questions to learn about participants’ reactions to the results. Participants are encouraged to ask questions and offer their opinions.
• Skits or role plays can announce the results in entertaining ways. For example, an evaluation team member can play a reporter giving a newscast and interview other evaluation team members and then interview the audience for its reactions.

When you have completed the feedback session, it is important to incorporate community participants’ observations into the team’s analysis of the results.

Presenting disappointing results

Not all programs achieve overwhelmingly positive results. Disappointing results may occur for many reasons, some that could have been prevented and others that may have been beyond the control of program implementers. Evaluations offer the opportunity to learn about successes and failures. Admitting that significant effort has not led to improved health or the achievement of other stated objectives can be difficult. To overcome their disappointment, some teams try to downplay the importance of these results, blame others for the outcome, or point to technical problems in the evaluation methodology.

Rather than disown the results, it can be more instructive to look at what happened and why in order to learn from the experience. What would you do differently? What assumptions did you make that may not have held up when tested? Have other similar communities experienced even worse conditions because they had not made the kind of effort that participating communities did? Facing “bad” results or results that may provoke conflict and being willing to learn from them is critical to moving forward. Similarly, even when results are positive, we need to understand why and how they were achieved if these results are to be sustained and similar methods and interventions are to be applied successfully in other settings.

Take time to celebrate success

The evaluation is a time to reflect on what has been achieved. Take the time to celebrate the victories—even the smallest ones—and plan with the community to acknowledge the good work that has been done. This celebration can be in the form of having a meal together, acknowledging people’s contributions with certificates or small tokens of appreciation, or in other culturally appropriate ways.