intelligent measurement

Summarizing evaluation reports

November 25, 2009 at 12:57 pm 1 comment

As I’ve written about previously, evaluation reports are notoriously under-read and underutilized. Aside from the executive summary, evaluators need to find ways of presenting their key findings in a summarized format that make them attractive to their publics.

Aside from the predictable Powerpoint summary (which still can serve a purpose), some of the techniques I have used – and that were well received by publics – are as follows:

Multimedia video: using interviews, graphs and quotes in a video to bring the evaluation results “to life” (see this post for an example)

Scorecard or “snapshot”: highlighting the key findings graphically in one page. See this example:

Summary sheet: summarizing the main findings, conclusions and recommendations in fact sheet of 2-4 pages.  See this example: Summary Sheet (pdf)

Findings table: summarizing the main findings, particularly useful where the evaluation is responding to pre-set objectives and indicators, as per this example:

I’m always interested to learn of new methods to summarize evaluation findings, so if you have any more ideas, please share them!

Entry filed under: Evaluation reporting, Evaluation use.