Evaluation Activities in Organizations

Much of the information in this topic is adapted from the book Field Guide to Nonprofit Program Design, Marketing and Evaluation.
Guidelines for evaluating the process and results of organizational change are included in the books Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development and Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development with Nonprofits .

Evaluation is carefully collecting information about something in order to make necessary decisions about it. There are a large number and wide variety of evaluations. Evaluation is closely related to performance management (whether about organizations, groups, processes or individuals), which includes identifying measures to assess progress toward achieving results.

General Guidelines About Doing All Forms of Evaluation
Overviews of Major Types of Evaluations

Also see
General Resources
Related Library Topics

Also See the Library's Blogs Related to Evaluations

In addition to the articles on this current page, see the following blogs which have posts related to this Evaluations. Scan down the blog's page to see various posts. Also see the section "Recent Blog Posts" in the sidebar of the blog or click on "next" near the bottom of a post in the blog.

Library's Business Planning Blog
Library's Building a Business Blog
Library's Strategic Planning Blog

General Guidelines About Doing All Forms of Evaluation

How to Design Successful Evaluation and Assessment Plans
Internal Eval Week: Pamela Bishop on Working as a New Internal Evaluator
Internal Evaluation Week: Debbie Cohen on Working with External Evaluators
Internal Eval Week: Anthony Kim on Balancing Dual Roles as an Internal Evaluator
Stanley Capela and Ariana Brooks on Planting a Seed to Overcome Resistance to Evaluation
Improving evaluation questions and answers: Getting actionable answers for real-world decision makers (takes long time to download)
Jack Mills on Setting Up Evaluation Contracts
Amy Germuth on Reporting Findings
Our Ineffectiveness at Measuring Effectiveness
How to Perform Evaluation Reports
Donald L Kirkpatrick's training evaluation model - the four levels of learning evaluation

Overviews of Major Types of Evaluations

Advertising Efforts
Boards of Directors (self-evaluation)
Chief Executive (evaluation by the Board of Directors)
Community Assessments
Customer Satisfaction (measuring)
Employee Performance
Financial Practices in Nonprofits
Fundraising Practices in Nonprofits
Group Performance
Human Resource Management Practices in Nonprofits
Legal Activities in Nonprofits
Marketing (scan down to Evaluating Your Marketing Efforts)
Organizational Communications
Organizational Performance
Program Evaluation (including outcomes-based evaluations)
Planning Practices in Nonprofits
Sales Performance
Self-Assessments
Training and Development

General Resources

American Evaluation Association Public Library
American Evaluation Association Discussion List
Innovation Network

For the Category of Evaluations (Many Kinds):

To round out your knowledge of this Library topic, you may want to review some related topics, available from the link below. Each of the related topics includes free, online resources.

Also, scan the Recommended Books listed below. They have been selected for their relevance and highly practical nature.